Listening

The title likely refers to a figure attending to the spoken Word—possibly Mary of Bethany seated at Christ's feet (Luke 10), or a more general meditation on the act of receiving scripture. Watanabe's compositions of this kind tend to reduce the scene to one or two seated figures with heavily outlined silhouettes, eyes often closed or downcast, hands folded in the lap. The image relies almost entirely on contour and on flat fields of mineral pigment—indigo, mustard, vermillion, [sumi](/glossary/sumi)-black—keyed to the textile vocabulary of Okinawan bingata. The ground sheet would be momigami, the crumpled [washi](/glossary/washi) whose veined and pitted surface is integral to Watanabe's prints; pigment settles unevenly into its creases, giving the color a soft, hand-dyed quality. The contemplative subject suits the slow, deliberate visual register of mingei aesthetics—a quietness Watanabe pursued throughout the six-decade body of woodblock work he produced from his Tokyo studio.