Week Forty-One: St. Francis Preaches to the Birds by Sadao Watanabe

October 13, 2019

Week Forty-One: St. Francis Preaches to the Birds by Sadao Watanabe

We travel halfway around the world this week for my second featured piece from the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection in this month dedicated to imagery of St. Francis of Assisi. It is a hand colored stencil print on momigami (wrinkled) mulberry paper of the nature-loving holy man preaching to the birds from Sadao Watanabe, the foremost Japanese Christian artist of the 20th century. Trained as a textile dyer, Watanabe found a way to "express Christianity within a Japanese context," using a traditional paste and handcut stencil technique for coloring kimonos from the Okinawa Islands to create images of sacred themes on paper that meld medieval European religious art with the stylized imagery of Japanese folk art prints. The intricate patterning and repetitive color scheme of the birds in this print of the saint from Assisi with his feathered flock reveal Watanabe's lifelong interest in the decorative motifs of Japanese fabric designs. (John Kohan)