“Catsquatch” stands 6 feet tall and looms over its creator, Shyama Golden. Domestic cats of all shapes and colors—Russian blues, Maine Coons, Siamese, Bengals, tabbies, tortoiseshells, tuxedos, Siberians, snowshoes, Norwegian forest cats—were huddling together like snowmen plodding through a snow-covered forest. Scale and craftsmanship aside, “Catsquatch” is charming, silly, and a little weird — probably not unlike the conversations between Golden and her partner, filmmaker Paul Trillo, that spawned the film.
“One winter, the weather was terrible and we were stuck inside, and we decided to write a story together,” Gordon said. “We just mixed some of our favorite things together, snowmen, Sasquatch and cats, and the answer was Sasquatch!”
Trillo envisioned a giant cat the size of Godzilla. Golden thought it was supposed to be a cat’s vortex. A brief period of inactivity turned into a two-month labor of love that encompassed Golden’s small apartment in Brooklyn, where she became aware of the figures in the oil painting as she stood on a kitchen chair and reached a canvas as large as the walls of her living room. Eventually, Golden plans to turn “Cat Wildcats” into an illustrated children’s book—the story of a cat who runs away from home to fight for independence and form a beast that threatens municipalities and government authority—perhaps a fable for teenagers. Finding space for all that towering outdoor work can cause problems. But even if she could afford a studio, painting in different locations would require the artist to wear work clothes, which is not her style. This book seems certain, though. With years of experience in commercial graphic design, typography, and illustration, Golden was ready to make his own.
Golden’s letterpress business card still features a familiar llama wearing thick-rimmed, nerdy-chic glasses, along with a dialogue box explaining that Schima “rhymes with llama.” It’s a gentle joke that makes us remember her name while reminding us that Golden’s Llamas was at the forefront of the llama craze. One of the screen-printed T-shirts she created in Austin featured a delightfully geeky font that was truly unexpected and widespread.
This subtle combination of whimsy and industry was typical of Golden’s early art. After completing full-time magazine work at Texas Monthly (where Golden grew up in Texas, as well as New Zealand and Sri Lanka, the birthplaces of her parents), Golden created the late-night 6-foot-by-5-foot oil painting “Cozy Brachiosaurus,” which depicts an idealized nuclear family, circa 1956, eating dinner in the belly of a dinosaur while a nearby volcano bubbles toward global extinction; 1980s female computer operator operating a mainframe in the belly of a large fish with a sad expression. For the latter, Golden read about women in early computing and studied photos of Larry Luckham, an operations manager at Bell Labs’ data center in Oakland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. No doubt she also dove headfirst into the world of ichthyology to select her fish. Exhaustive research is both part of Golden’s creative process and a means of avoiding it.
It’s in her genes.
Golden’s parents were both scientists. Her father was a chemist and soil scientist who worked on NASA’s Mars team. Her mother trained as an entomologist but was unable to coordinate the mass killing of so many insects, so she became an immunologist. In Golden’s home, framed electron microscope photos hang as art on the walls, and her own bedroom is decorated with nothing but NASA posters.
