Vol de Nuit

"Vol de Nuit" — Night Flight, also the title of Saint-Exupéry's 1931 novel — pictures a bird or birds in nocturnal flight, set against the saturated black that mezzotint produces from a fully rocked copper plate. The Birds & Flowers tag places the print within the strand of Watanabe's practice in which kacho-e subjects, filtered through European technique, became increasingly central. Mezzotint is well suited to night imagery: where line-based intaglio must build dark tones cumulatively, the rocker prepares the plate as black from the outset, and forms appear by removing tone rather than adding it. A bird in flight, scraped into pale grey from this ground, reads as a body emerging from darkness rather than placed upon it. The plate connects Watanabe's work to a long tradition of Japanese bird-and-flower printmaking while applying a Western printmaking technique, a synthesis consistent with his career-long position between Tokyo, where he trained, and France, where he has lived and worked since the late 1970s.