Crows Size

The title is almost certainly an awkward English rendering of Consider the Ravens (Luke 12:24, "Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap"), a passage in which Christ uses the birds as an image of God's provision. Watanabe returned to this avian subject more than once. The composition typically isolates one or several stylized crow forms against a flat ground, the birds reduced to bold black silhouettes with the geometric poise of textile motifs—closer to mon (family crests) than to ornithological study. [Sumi](/glossary/sumi)-black ink carries most of the image, broken by sparing fields of mineral color, all printed on momigami whose creased, leathery texture is left visible as part of the design. The reference to a Gospel teaching is in keeping with Watanabe's lifelong project of reframing Christian scripture through the formal vocabulary of Okinawan bingata stencil dyeing and the mingei folk-craft sensibility he absorbed from Soetsu Yanagi in the 1930s.