Plenty of Nothing

Katerina Belkina

Source.

Caterina Cornaro

Dürer's portrait of Caterina Cornaro was drawn in 1494, and is probably based on a work by his Venetian host Gentile Bellini. Caterina was the last queen of the Kingdom of Cyprus before the island was taken over by the Venetians, and later the Ottomans. She spent her later years in Italy and was painted by Titian, Bellini and others. There are no decent copies of Dürer's drawing on the internet, because it has not been seen since it was looted from Kunsthalle Bremen's emergency storage at the end of WWII. Source.

Catherine of Saxony as Salome

Lucas Cranach the Elder and his studio cranked out multiple images of Judith and Salome, the Biblical decapitatrices. (You can tell the one from the other because Salome always brings the head in on a platter.) Cranach's female figures are generally small-shouldered, slouchy, wan look-alikes. But this Salome, held in the Musea Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, is a portrait of a real individual, Catherine of Saxony.

About Cathy Deirdre Zinck

Cathy Deirdre Zinck (Zinck for short) is a character written and drawn by Douglas Archibald McLeod. She appears in the cartoon "Zinck Comix" as a college undergraduate, and as a thirty-year-old comics reviewer in the novelette "Wonderful Hell".

She is herself a cartoonist.  All Zinck Comix, comics about Evangeline Brandt or Colleen Hill, plus some other cartoons posted on this site, are billed as her work, and usually carry the signature CDZ.

Zinck Comix is largely autobiographical and takes place from about 1997 to 1999, during the second half of her undergraduate career, and mainly concerns her sex life.  Flashbacks to her childhood touch on some of the history contained in the projected Autobiography of Cathy Deirdre Zinck.

She was born June 2, 1977, two months after her parents' wedding, and shortly before their high school graduation from West Kings District High School in Auburn, Nova Scotia.  The marriage of Joanne Saulnier and Jamie Urquhart lasted less than six months (Zinck: "I was the only one in the house who didn't cry all day."), and when Cathy Deirdre was two years old her mother married Randy Zinck.  Joanne and Randy settled in East Paradise, Nova Scotia, and had a second daughter, Caroline, Cathy Deirdre's arch-nemesis. 

Cathy Deirdre discovered the atom-smashing power of sarcasm early in her teens.  She got a guitar at fourteen, had a hippie period, then during the summer before Grade 12 shaved her head and joined the Halifax band King Shit.  She is co-author of the song "Puppy Mill".

It was during this period that she declared for lesbianism, and began her on-again-off-again relationship with her conjoined twin Dana Louise Taggart.

She took a four-year Bachelor's degree in English Literature at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.  She cartooned for the student newspaper and for a Halifax indie The Beach Whistle.  Upon graduation in 1999 she enrolled in a Master's program at the University of Toronto, and waited tables at The Café of the Personifications on Bloor.  She returned to Halifax, bought The Beach Whistle for $1, and restored it to solvency.  She writes, edits and publishes it under various pseudonyms.

She has brown hair.