Fat Cat Art

Circa 1955, Toksovo, Russia, self-portrait by Tatiana Iskuzhina







How I Met Zarathustra the Cat

Perhaps you were a bit surprised to see on the cover of this book that my coauthor is not a human, but a Cat. It is not a joke or a marketing trick; the impact of Zarathustra on my work is so important that he fully deserves to be coauthor of our Fat Cat Art project.

First let me introduce myself. My name is Svetlana Petrova. I am a woman living in St. Petersburg, Russia. I am a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University. After graduating with a first-class degree, I discovered that I am too independent to work in the system. So I became an artist.

In fact, I had been drawing and writing poetry from childhood. My mother taught me everything, although she was not a professional artist herself. She was an engineer and a teacher of cybernetics at the St. Petersburg Naval Institute, but she was an artist in her soul. My mother made beautiful black-and-white photos, which she then painted in aquarelle colors, such as the self-portrait on the dedication page. You can see she was a beautiful and elegant woman. So it s no surprise that my path in art began in the fields of fashion and theater. I created a bizarre fashion show called L.E.M. Laboratory of Experimental Models and toured it all over Europe in the nineties.

I have always been very curious and liked to investigate new fields, so I decided to become an event producer. I got acquainted with lots of interesting people in my travels and wanted to present their art in my country and so I brought to Russia some live music and theater acts. Meanwhile I was interested in implanting video screens in my costumes and did so with a screen displaying interactive moving images controlled by computer. Thus I fell in love with animation. And in 2003, I created the International Festival of Animation Arts: Multivision, now

Svetlana Petrova is an artist, producer, and curator living in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is the founder and director of the International Festival of Animation Arts, "Multivision." In 2011, she created FatCatArt.com an experiment to combine art history and the spirit of LOLcats. Her "famous paintings improved by cats" went viral and became an internet sensation. She adopted her feline coauthor and mews, Zarathustra, when her mother died. Loved and spoiled by Svetlana s mother, this 8-year-old ginger tabby cat is 10 kilos of pure undisturbed joy, although he is trying to diet.

On Svetlana Petrova:

"Hilarious"
Daily Mail

"Every nerd loves a great cat meme, and artist Svetlana Petrova s work on classic paintings featuring her big ginger cat Zarathustra takes it to a whole new level."
Nerdalicious

"Russian artist Svetlana Petrova has created a series of cat-infused classic art pieces. An ode to her own cat Zarathustra, Petrova's work is unlike any other series."
Trend Hunter

"Now that's what we call a masterpuss."
Oxford Mail

"A Russian artist has taken hundreds of classic paintings and Photoshoppped her pet cat Zarathustra into them, making them, in our opinion, 89426576 times better."
Metro