By David Ellis.
WHEN English surrealist artist Richard Saunders used the wonders of Photoshop to recreate his beloved pet cat Tolly in topiary-like form in settings amid famous British lakesides, grand-houses, gardens and beaches, he was blown away with just how many people who saw those pictures took them to be real fair-dinkum works of topiary art.
“I’ve actually been somewhat bemused,” he says today, seven years after creating his first topiary image of Tolly. “Because I did them for fun rather than any commercial purpose, and it’s been fascinating to see a simple idea metamorphosis into something of a now internet phenomenon.”
Such a phenomenon in fact that some of the images have been viewed up to 3.5 million times, and he’s been inundated with requests to create with Photoshop other peoples’ pets in topiary form set in their own or famous public gardens.
“But I have to say No,” he says, adding “I only do ones of Tolly who sadly passed away in 2016, and they’re to his memory.”
Each image can take up to three days to create on Photoshop as a topiary image of Tolly, a Russian Blue, and set in a vast range of well-known and identifiable locations.
And when countless viewers write or phone Richard asking where they can actually see his topiaries of Tolly, he says he has to explain to them, too, that they are not real topiaries and have been created on Photoshop, adding “and I explain all that because I would rather be known for my art, than my deception.”
To view Richard Saunders’ works of Tolly look up www.thetopiarycat.co.uk
