Non-Human Environmental Variables in Open Spaces: Observing Cats and Painting Material Behaviors

During long-term material observation and painting records, there is a variable that does not actively participate in material operations, yet cannot be fully excluded from the working space: the cat.

A cat does not actively interact with alcohol inks, pigments, acrylics, pan watercolors, or oil pastels in a material sense. It does not react to changes in material states, nor has its meowing, movement, or physical presence been observed to directly alter material behavior.

However, a cat is a constantly active living entity. It moves, jumps, runs, sheds hair, and stirs up dust in the air during its activities. These small, everyday environmental factors sometimes enter ongoing material processes.

Therefore, while there is no direct material reaction between the cat and the paints, a form of indirect contact occurs through the surrounding environment.

I. Indirect Entry of Physical Objects (Hair and Airborne Particles)

Cat activities (such as moving, jumping, and running) cause shed hair to fall and stir up settled dust in the room. These fine materials enter the material system through two primary pathways:

1. Open Exposure of Mediums and Tools

• Alcohol Ink: Alcohol ink flows easily and evaporates quickly, usually operated in open air. Shed hair can drop directly into liquid ink or settle onto the surface with air currents. Additionally, tools kept in open spaces—such as small mixing cups, pipettes, and blowers—may carry small amounts of hair or fibers before or during use.
• Pigment Powder and Paint Paste: Unopened pigment powders remain isolated inside their containers. However, during container opening, powder scooping, binder addition, stirring, transferring, and grinding, materials are exposed to the open air. As room air gets stirred up by animal activity, hair and dust easily drop into the paint paste, or attach to tools before being carried into the paint.
• Liquid Paint Pouring: Pouring is an open, multi-stage process where paint stays exposed over longer periods. Hair can occasionally be seen sitting on the surface of paint being poured or dried. Some hairs are noticed right during operation, while others are discovered only after the material has set.

2. Feedback across Material Systems

• Pan Watercolors: Once dried, pan watercolors reach a stable state, reducing the chance of foreign objects entering the interior. However, hair may still attach to the surface during long-term open storage or painting. Observations show these hairs act similarly to human hair or airborne fibers—they are external attachments that do not alter the paint's intrinsic structure.
• Acrylic Paint: Due to acrylic paint’s high opacity, hair that enters the liquid is often hard to spot in the finished artwork. If hair lands on wet acrylic, attempting to remove it by hand changes the local shape of the paint. In this case, the final surface change results from both the external hair and the subsequent human intervention.
• Oil Pastels: Oil pastel sticks have a naturally tacky surface. Long exposure to air causes hairs to stick to them, which then transfer onto paper during drawing. Removing surface hair is simply cleaning off an external attachment; the solid state and re-activatable nature of the oil pastel itself remain unchanged.

II. Invisible Micro-Particles and Acoustic Independence

Beyond visible hair, animal activity introduces other environmental variables that behave differently:

1. Hidden Settling of Fine Dust

Compared to hair, dust particles stirred up by movement are much smaller and usually impossible to notice in real time during painting. In open spaces, the settling of these tiny particles is a natural, occasional event, showing that real working spaces are not absolutely dust-free systems.

2. Independence of Acoustic Variables (Sound)

A cat’s meow, running steps, or other movement sounds are simply acoustic vibrations in the air. Observation records show that sound causes no direct change to the flow direction of alcohol ink, paint drying speed, adhesion, or physical state shifts. Sound and hair/dust are entirely different variables, with sound showing no mechanism for directly entering the material system.

III. Differences Between Human (Active) and Cat (Environmental) Variables

In a material behavior system, humans and living animals play distinctly different roles:

• Human (Active Intentional Variable): Responsible for measuring, transferring, adding binders, grinding, pouring, correcting, and saving, while making continuous decisions based on observations.
• Cat (Occasional Environmental Variable): Does not participate in active operations or respond to material states; influences the setup purely through physical activities that alter air movement, dust settling, and hair shedding.

Summary

In practical studio observations, a material system is not a closed space consisting solely of "materials" and the "painter." The presence of an active animal represents an indirect, occasional, and non-human environmental variable. This variable is neither an inherent property of the paints nor a main driver of material behavior; it is simply an objective environmental condition recorded truthfully within the material behavior archive.