Love Cat Red

This was another project I took to Okazaki’s studio, bringing the picture and the fabrics to mount. The calligraphy is by Fumiyo Yoshikawa, the cat by me, and the haiku composed by Sumiho Shimosaka, from her prize-winning collection called Gankō

（眼光, 2013)

恋猫の眠れば花の模様かな　koineko no nemureba hana no moyō kana

A cat in heat yet asleep floribundant

The intensely red interior framing is the thin habutai silk lining of a woman’s kimono— called momi in Japanese. The outer framing is meisen—an ikat-woven silk popular in the 1920s and ’30’s for women’s kimono and haori jackets.

Mr. Okazaki felt there was no question but that the two fabrics should be used in this orientation—red for interior framing, pattern on the outside. As an experiment, when I got back to California I mounted another of the “cat in heat” pictures, reversing the plain and solid. (see Love Cat Pink.)