A happy family of cats… an innocuous portrait of togetherness, and an insurance that they won’t run away as single cats have the infernal habit of running away suddenly leaving their owner weeping buckets. Yet, all might not be that well if the colour of the feline fur can be taken as a paternity gauge. Papa, whose head is covered by a finicky Mama looking over her little ones, is orange. Mama is spotty – the same as one of her larger offspring, but the ‘baby’ is white. And cats usually litter when giving birth, imagine Mama giving birth one by one, unless the other siblings have been given away or perish the thought, run away themselves. To the artist Dzulkifli Buyong, cats were his best companions: they overrun his canvases – Manja, Tiga Kucing, Cat’s Mother and Child – just to mention a few. Like David Kwo Da Wei, Dzulkifli had a partiality for black cats, while Teng Chok Dee is known for his drawings of gangs of cats. Black cats, orange cats, white cats, spotty cats, they all still meow the same way, and they come with a hefty price, like RM84,000 for a two-cat painting, Manja. Dzulkifli Buyong is the child art prodigy of the Wednesday Art Group (WAG) who excelled himself at the age of 14 when he grabbed the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Prizes, for pastels, in the Young Friends art competition in 1962. He won the 1st and 2nd Prizes again in 1963. In 1964, he won 2nd Prize in the Joy Of Living competition, again for a pastel work. Together with Patrick Ng Kah Onn, his mentor at Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur, they were the leading lights of WAG, set up by art education pioneer Peter Harris. He was sent to Japan for art training for three years in the late 1960s, but could not cope with life there. Dzulkifli’s Kucing Sakit (c. 1980s), 86 x 62cm, was sold for RM 134,400 in Henry Butcher Art Auction October 2018 edition.