As I continue pursuing an interest in woodblock prints picked up early last year, my favorite artist remains Kiyoshi Saito. A few weeks back a print of his came to auction that I hadn’t seen before – his 1957 ‘Buddha Siamese.’ It went for well less than I expected so it’s now mine – fortunate, since I’d decided to fight for it regardless. There are copies at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (that has a surprisingly rich collection of the artist’s works) and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco but I can’t find any substantive info on the piece. The artist seems to have done a similar black and white image a few years later in 1962 but that’s all I have for now. Still, it’s too nice not to share. It’s now in my bedroom and my daughter shouts ‘Hi, Buddha’ each morning as she comes to wake me.

There are very few English resources on Saito. The fullest is a recent exhibition book (Saito Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening) that follows overviews on his life and technique with brief sections on the genres he worked in. It’s hardly comprehensive as it claims but it gives more structure and examples than the other treatments I’ve found. Online there are brief (and mostly overlapping) biographies at two of the better dealer sites (Ronin Gallery and Moonlit Sea, with bibliography on the latter). These also feature works for sale while Ukiyo-e hosts a larger selection aggregated from a number of collections. Past that, Google is your friend since the best compilations are all in hard to find (and expensive when found) Japanese volumes.

But here are some of his cats. There’s a clear progression from the less stylized earlier row (1940s-50s) to the hyper-elongated (sometimes owl-ish) geometrics of the second row (1950s-70s) and later back to something of a blend in the third row (1980s, though the right-hand piece is, as best I can tell, a late revision of an earlier one from the 1960s).