Fluttering All together

This third impression of Fluttering All Together repeats Saito Kaoru's motif of dispersed forms in flight, registered in the dense, light-absorbing blacks characteristic of mezzotint. Where woodblock printmakers worked from light paper toward applied pigment, Saito worked from a fully roughened plate toward selectively scraped highlights, a method that yields gradations of tone closer to charcoal drawing than to the flat color fields of traditional ukiyo-e. Within the edition, slight variations in inking and wiping produce subtle differences between impressions, so each print carries individual tonal weight even as the image remains consistent. The subject — birds or butterflies suggested by the title — places this work within the kacho-e thematic tradition, while the technique aligns Saito with twentieth-century intaglio practice as developed by Hamaguchi Yozo. Saito turned to mezzotint in 1968 after working in abstract oils, and prints such as this demonstrate how he carried a painter's attention to atmosphere into the disciplined tonal architecture of the burr-roughened copper plate.