Fluttering All Together

The title Fluttering All Together suggests a massed image of birds, butterflies, or wind-borne forms in collective motion. In Saito's intaglio vocabulary, such a subject would typically be rendered through closely worked etched lines combined with aquatint or mezzotint passages, allowing each individual form to register against a unified tonal ground. The repetition of small, scattered motifs across the plate echoes the pictorial logic of [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) — the bird-and-flower genre established in Edo-period woodblock — while transposing it into the European intaglio idiom Saito adopted after 1968. The emphasis on rhythmic dispersal rather than singular focus stands somewhat apart from the figurative concentration of his Tale of Genji series. It reflects the broader range of subjects he pursued in smaller editions, where natural and atmospheric phenomena allowed him to explore the textural possibilities of the etched plate at intimate scale, working at the boundary between observed motif and abstract pattern.