Knitting

Knitting offered Saito an intimate domestic subject quite unlike his temples and gardens, a woman bent over her work in the absorbed concentration of skilled handcraft. The composition likely shares formal qualities with his figure studies from the late 1940s and 1950s—the body reduced to a volume of interlocking planes, the hands implied by gesture rather than anatomical detail. There is something almost devotional in his treatment of focused human labor, as if knitting and prayer occupied the same quality of attention.