Tabby Panel – Part 1

Written By Sasha Kopf

My dad and I are collaborating on a marquetry project: an homage to Fra Giovanni da Verona, an Italian monk and woodworker. He died in 1525, so next year is the 500th anniversary of his death.

Fra Giovanni’s artwork decorates the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore in Tuscany. Among other things, he created panels with images of arches framing animals.

One such image is a tabby cat seated under an arch, with an Italian landscape in the background.

Marquetry panel with an image of a tabby cat sitting under an ornate arch with numerous columns. In the background, there is a landscape with hills dotted with trees and small buildings.

Image from the book Il coro intarsiato dell’Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore by Giovanni Brizzi

My dad and I decided that I would make the cat, and he would make the background.

I created a drawing of a cat in the same pose as the cat in Fra Giovanni’s panel.

Pencil drawing of a seated tabby cat

The cat in my drawing is a mashup of Fra Giovanni’s cat and my own tabby cat, Gabe. In spite of being an absolute goblin, Gabe is very sweet and extremely photogenic.

Photograph of my extraordinarily cute tabby cat, Gabe, sitting on a windowsill. He is looking wistfully into the middle distance. Outside the window behind him are trees with green leaves.

The marquetry cat’s face took me about three days to complete.

Photograph of a marquetry cat's fate in progress. Since the face has not been cut into a background yet, there is excess wood around the outline of the face.

In total, the face consists of over 60 tiny pieces of wood. I used at least ten different types of wood to make the face:

  • black ebony and bog oak for the black stripes

  • teak and oak for the brown stripes

  • holly for the white highlights

  • nara for the nose

  • walnut, zebrawood, and macassar ebony for the ears

  • a particularly green piece of poplar for the eyes

I sand shaded some of the veneer on the face to give it additional depth and detail. I will write a post about sand shading in the future, but essentially, the process involves scorching the edge of a piece of veneer by dipping it in very hot, fine-grained sand.

My supply of some of the veneers – particularly the bright white holly – is limited, so I tried to make use of every scrap that I could. I keep cups of holly and ebony scraps on the workbench and will use pieces until they are too small to cut on the scroll saw.

After I finished the cat’s face, I made the torso out of just two pieces of teak and bog oak, in one long cut on the scroll saw that took me a couple hours to complete.

Photograph of two pieces of veneer side by side. The two pieces were cut at the same time in a long, squiggly pattern.

Earlier this year, I started experimenting with abstract squiggly patterns in marquetry. The patterns on the tabby cat were similar to this in a lot of ways.

Close-up photograph of a marquetry panel. In the center of the panel is a circle of coral-like squiggles made out of a gold-colored wood set against a reddish mahogany.

Before cutting the pattern on the tabby’s back, I had to prep the veneer by rubbing wood glue into the wood fibers and covering one side with blue tape. If I hadn’t done this, the veneer would have fallen apart as I cut it, since the shape that I cut was so elaborate.

After about five days of work, the cat was complete, and I could hand the project over to my dad to work on the background.

Photograph of a marquetry tabby cat in project. The cat is completed, but since it has not been cut into the background of the piece yet, there is excess veneer around it.
Sasha Kopf
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