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.
