The Nature of Life: Shyama Golden on Art, identity, & The Not So Elusive Catsquatch
At six feet tall, “Catsquatch” looms over its creator Shyama Golden. House cats of every shape and hue—Russian Blue, Maine Coon, Siamese, Bengal, Tabby, Tortoiseshell, Tuxedo, Siberian, Snowshoe, Norwegian Forest—cling together in the shape of a yeti lumbering through a snow-covered forest. Scale and skill aside, “Catsquatch” is charming, silly, and little bit weird—probably not unlike the conversation between Golden and her partner, filmmaker Paul Trillo, which spawned it.
“One winter when the weather was shit and we were stuck inside, we decided to write a story together,” says Golden. “We just mashed together some things we love, yetis, sasquatch, and cats, and the answer was Catsquatch!”
Trillo envisioned one giant, Godzilla-sized cat. Golden thought it should be a maelstrom of cats. The passing idle became a two-month labor of love that subsumed Golden’s small Brooklyn apartment as she realized the character in oil paint while standing on a kitchen chair to reach a canvas that is as large as her living room wall. Ultimately, Golden plans to turn Catsquatch into an illustrated children’s book—a story about cats that run away from home in a bid for independence, forming a beast that threatens municipalities and government authority—a parable, perhaps, for tweens. Finding space for all that towering outwork might pose a problem. But, even if she could afford a studio, painting at a different location would necessitate the artist getting dressed for work, which is not how she rolls. The book, though, seems a certainty. With years of commercial graphic design, font design, and illustration under her belt, Golden is more than ready to make it herself.
Golden’s letterpress business cards still bears the drawing of a familiar llama in thick-rimmed, nerdy-chic eyeglasses, and a speech bubble explaining Shyama “rhymes with llama.” It’s a gentle joke that commits her name to memory while reminding us that Golden’s camelid led the pack in the llama craze. A screen-printed T-shirt she created in Austin during the aughts tapped into a truly unexpected and widespread font of gleeful geekery.
This subtle coupling of whimsy and assiduousness is typical of much of Golden’s early art. Working late at night, after her full-time magazine gig at Texas Monthly (Golden grew up in Texas, as well as New Zealand and Sri Lanka, where her parents were born), Golden created, among others, the 6’ x 5’ oil painting “Home Sweet Brachiosaurus,” in which an idealized nuclear family, circa 1956, sits down to dinner inside the belly of a dinosaur while nearby volcanoes bubble toward global extinction; and “Covert Operations,” a painting which reveals a group of female computer operators from the 1960s working on mainframes in the belly of a large, sad-faced fish. For the latter, Golden read about women in early computing and studied the photographs of Larry Luckham, an operations manager at a Bell Labs data center in Oakland during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. No doubt, she also plunged into the world of ichthyology to choose her fish. Exhaustive research is both part of Golden’s creative process and a means for avoiding it.
It’s kind of in her genes.
Golden’s parents are scientists. Her father was a chemist and soil scientist who worked for NASA on the Mars team; her mother trained as an entomologist but could not reconcile the mass killing of so many bugs, so became an immunologist. In Golden’s family’s home, framed electron-microscope photography hung on the walls as art and her own bedroom was decorated with nothing but NASA posters.
“I considered scientific illustration at one point,” says Golden whose attention to flora in her paintings remains elegant and meticulous. “My parents actually discouraged me from going into science because of how much they struggled.”
Still, Golden’s love of research, of seeking out the overlooked, has shown its worth in work well beyond her fanciful presentation of an oft-ignored history of women in early computing, inside the belly of a fish. It is a method that has sustained her, even as the times have changed.
“When I lived in Austin in the ‘00s, there was a carefree and kitschy vibe which was reflected in my work,” reminds Golden. “In the current decade, I’ve definitely turned more to the psychological.”
There is a swathe of people who first discovered Golden as one of the illustrators chosen by The Washington Post to reflect on the first anniversary of the Women’s March. Golden’s image—crisp, clean, light-hearted, and optimistic in style, but strong, defiant, and thought-provoking in content—is a map of the United States comprised of dozens of women who have pushed the struggle for equal rights forward: Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dolores Huerta, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Ibtihaj Muhammad, Michelle Obama, Bella Abzug, and Beyoncé Knowles to name a few. The population of Golden’s America is multi-racial, multi-cultural, and inclusive, giving equal weight to trans-women, gay women, athletes, artists, activists, scientists, and kids.
Golden has described her preparation for this work as a “crash course in women’s studies.” After the research, it took her forty-eight hours to create the illustration but it’s still paying off. There are teachers and parents who have followed Golden’s lead, using her print as a tool to explore the complex stories behind each face she depicted. For more advanced bluestockings, the art has served as friendly name-game, the feminist equivalent of Scott Park’s robot prints for science fiction super geeks.
In 2017, the year before the Post article, Golden did an illustration of Issa Rae at the request of art director Dian Holton, a known diversity and inclusion advocate. It was followed by eleven more, all dynamic women of color: First Lady Michelle Obama, costume designer June Ambrose, interior designer Sheila Bridges, transgender rights advocate Janet Mock, and actresses like Lupita Nyong’o, Rosario Dawson, and Priyanka Chopra. Golden presented them in her hip, humorous style but with direct gazes and unflinching boldness—an approach she had used previously in renderings of Spike Lee, Biggie Smalls, and, most keenly, the Indian activist and writer Arundhati Roy. These portraits spread across the internet where she is routinely lauded as an artistic champion of women of color, an artist who seeks to capture women who are as complex as she is.
My parents actually discouraged me from going into science because of how much they struggled.”
“I would love to see people of color in art normalized—not that we aren’t weird and unique, as individuals,” says Golden, “but it should be normal to see us in Western portraiture.”
Instead, it is political. Especially now.
“I don’t aim for my art to be political, but because I have my own perspective and worldview, that inevitably comes through in the art,” says Golden, adding: “I don’t really know how you can not be political during a time when people are so polarized and misinformation is everywhere.”
I don’t really know how you can not be political during a time when people are so polarized and misinformation is everywhere.”
After reading about the Great Pacific garbage patch, Golden used Procreate to make a repeating pattern of trash islands. “Icebergs,” another seamless vector pattern, shows seals and polar bears separated by sea on ever-dwindling chunks of ice pack. “Spiritual Tourism” represents the commodification and colonization of ayahuasca. “Trash Trees” is a pop-art take on the ubiquitous fluttering plastic grocery bag. “About Face” is a surrealist reaction to feminine objectification in the form of infinite hand mirrors (it is but one of Golden’s patterns that have been turned into real wallpaper). Amid these eye-popping critiques are unbridled celebrations of rocks, minerals, flowers, birds, and fungi that are at once classically beautiful and giddily post-modern. In a word: complex.
“The nature of life is that, most of the time, people are just working really hard to survive. They barely have a moment to reflect and just be. Art can be a reminder to stop and do that,” says Golden, adding, “and art, especially commercial art, also has the power to change perceptions, and that should not be taken lightly.”
Which does not mean that Golden takes herself seriously. (She also has a marvelous vector pattern of falling cats.)
“Road Trip,” a recent self-portrait, shows Golden dressed in a tribal animal costume that is somehow part black bear and part alligator. She is driving a teal-green hatchback hurling through the hardscrabble Texas landscape with a companion cat. In a diptych called “Home,” Golden wears the same animal mask in bed and in the living room of her Brooklyn apartment. Trillo is with her, wearing a yakka mask traditionally used in Sri Lankan “devil” dances.
“Illusions are an important concept in Buddhism. The entire idea of identity is a bit of smoke and mirrors,” explains Golden, who triumphantly wore an entire pantsuit made from “Catsquatch” fabric at a recent exhibition. “My personal angle is that there is joy and beauty, and connection to something bigger than yourself, in terms of identity as well.”
And thankfully, cats. Many, many cats.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 52, which is sold out. Get our next issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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