Pet of the Month: Bilbo
FROM DECEMBER 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Bilbo isn't afraid to show her many sides, and on the afternoon I met her, I saw two of them. She greeted me with curiosity, rubbing her head against my hand, but later, when I went to pet her goodbye, she swung a set of claws at me to let me know I was dismissed
I wasn’t surprised. Bilbo’s owner, painter Rachel Parry, had described her cat when we first spoke as one of her most complex subjects.
Parry adopted Bilbo after she was found by a neighbour trekking the sixth-floor hallway of one of Parkdale’s West Lodge towers. Parry mistook the lost adventurer for a tom until the cat began yowling through the night “like a British ambulance,” knocking over every jar on the spice shelf. Before long, the fullness of her new roommate’s nature began to emerge through Parry’s brush.
Like plenty of cats, Bilbo often composes herself nobly, and in her first appearance on canvas she is drinking tea from a cup and saucer, an image that went on to sell many prints, along with T-shirts and mugs. The original is displayed for sale at the George Street Diner in Corktown.
Then there’s Bilbo the adored child. Influenced by The Mandalorian’s baby Yoda, another work shows the cat with oversized ears and a look of innocent discovery on her face, as she watches a goldfish leap out of a teacup. (It’s a twist on a true story: Bilbo swatted Rachel’s pet fish Poseidon out of his tank and left him on a chair to die.)
There’s Bilbo wearing the shirt of Parry’s partner, Mikey, and taking a draw from Mikey’s vape, put to canvas during a Daddy phase. Bilbo playing a theremin. Bilbo with eyes replaced by supernaturally green moons.
And then, most strikingly, Bilbo’s head on Queen Elizabeth’s body – the first Elizabeth, in a dress with a wide frilled ruff. Bilbo, the painter admits, rules their lives.
Parry, who also sells other people’s art at Gallery 222 in Chinatown, often paints at home. But when Bilbo wants attention, she gets her way by throwing and kicking things off the table until Rachel stops work to play a game of fetch with scrunched-up pieces of paper. Bilbo smacks both of her humans’ faces to wake them up in the morning; she smacks Mikey at bedtime, too, to make sure he stays in bed.
Her queendom extends beyond Rachel’s apartment. When a burst pipe caused a flood, Bilbo was sent to a friend’s for the night, where she terrorized a Maine Coon named Karl so badly that he had to be isolated. Bilbo is no longer allowed to visit the vet unless she’s given gabapentin, a muscle relaxant, beforehand. And twice, she tried to dominate her own Queen Bilbo portrait by pulling it off the wall.
But while the series of paintings reveals Bilbo’s personalities, there’s a side of the cat that hasn’t yet been captured: Bilbo the saviour. She was discovered at the end of 2018. When COVID arrived, Parry lost many of the housecleaning and childcare gigs that paid her rent, and covered the cost of Bilbo’s asthma medication and dustproof litter made of crushed walnuts. But people were home and online, and they were starting to come across paintings of Bilbo on social media and on Parry’s website. It made them realize they wanted to immortalize their own pets, too, and so the commissions began: a shepherd mix’s face emerging from the olive-green dress of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, a blue and yellow turban on its head; a black lab as Rosie of Cleves; a crew of eight guinea pigs on a pirate ship – portrayed not as they appear to most, but in the shape of who they truly are.