Noboru sawai autobiography

by Grace Eiko Thomson

Noboru Sawai, was a rare artist in our midst, a cross-cultural post-modernist, who, in fact, contributed greatly to contemporary Canadian printmaking.

I had heard about him when I was working as a contemporary art curator in Winnipeg (Gallery 1.1.1., University of Manitoba) while acting as art advisor to Inuit printmakers in Baker Lake, NWT (1980s). I visited him in Vancouver, and asked him to come to Baker Lake to teach the printmakers of Sanavik Cooperative the art of woodblock printing.

Noboru sawai autobiography

I felt in watching the Inuit printmakers work with stone how dangerous this was to their health, as without ventilation in the studio room dust was always in the air.

Noboru Sawai passed away on April 23, 2016, at age 85, here in Vancouver.

His biography, told by his daughter, Naomi, at the Celebration of Life gathering at his studio, offers a difficult but a very interesting and passionately focused lifetime. Born in the port city of Takamatsu (Shikoku), as a young