Welcome to Bohemian Cats

First, a little bit about us for those who don’t know our work. We run a small design studio specialising in highly decorative and detailed work – and we confess to being cat obsessed. The studio, BabaBarock,  used to be in Prague (in what was historically Bohemia) but moved to the south-west of Ireland in 2016. Our cats of course came with us so we now  have an interesting tribe of both Czech and Irish cats – fortunately they all speak fluent feline.

One of our earliest projects was a tarot deck called The Baroque Bohemian Cats’ Tarot which since it came out in 2003 has become a bit of a classic and seems to have an ever-growing following. To create the imagery, we made tiny, cat-sized baroque costumes and then, using digital techniques, used them to “dress” a variety of cats. Since then, we’ve tried from time to time to do more Bohemian Cats imagery, but in our busy studio, there was rarely enough time to devote to such intricate, time-consuming pieces.

In 2019, we made a decision to begin to transition away from other design to focus on The Bohemian Cats – it’s work that we love doing and that feels quite magical. Finally being able to ake the time it needs is  allowing us to start make completely new costumes – far more detailed than our originals – and to apply all the advanced illustration techniques that we have developed in the years since we began. We’ll be making a whole new Bohemian Cats tarot deck (probably out in late 2003), and also, we hope, a book and many decorative wearables and interior items. We’re going to show the process and progression as we progress. We also decided, to put it into context, that we’d like to talk about the whole history of anthropomorphic cats and beyond, to discuss cats and belief, cats and magic and cats in fairytale and myth – all the things that are inspiring our own Bohemian Cats.

We hope you will enjoy the blog – and for now, here is a video about the making of The Bohemian Cats – it was shot on the very last days before lockdown – but now, two years later, we are finally all back in the studio doing this work that we love.