"Fur Coats & Backpacks" a collection of travel cat illustration portraits and their little poems. The project grew gently over nearly ten years, the first book was published in 2022 by Chin Music Press. 

 

Art works are painted by water color on paper sized 9" x 12" / 2011-2024​​

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Artist Statement 

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“Cross the shallow river deeply.”
– Michio Hoshino

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I began painting the traveling Cats on impulse—
a quiet, heart-led pull I didn’t fully understand.
Only later did I realize I was making portraits of traveling souls—
each one a reflection of my own journey, and a gentle act of healing.

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A few years before this project began, I moved away from my home in Japan and settled in Seattle.
It was a leap into the unfamiliar—filled with discovery and a quiet longing,
like the soft melancholy of leaving home.
Through many beautiful encounters, I found kindred spirits—
friends who helped me grow roots in new soil,
and shaped a new sense of belonging.

Meanwhile, in the quiet between all of that—those soft, inward moments—
I often returned to the quiet beneath it all, where the stillness inside me waited.
That’s where the traveling Cats began to appear.

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They carry invisible things: memory, solitude, resilience, passion ...
Soft creatures of light and shadow integrated,
each arriving with their own quiet vibration bringing colors, images and sometimes sounds.

Drawing them became a ritual of tuning in—to myself, to feeling,
to the flow of becoming.

Each piece let me meet something tender within,
and release it with care.

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My work honors the in-between—
the parts of us still traveling, still becoming.
And the quiet magic that arises when we say yes to the path ahead.

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-Mari Ichimasu 

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