The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense)

The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense), by New York-based artist Darren Waterston and Tyrus Miller, a professor of modern European literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a portfolio of prints and boadsides with text inspired by the life of Francis of Assisi, the thirteenth-century mystic saint. The title The Flowering derives from the Fioretti, or Little Flowers of Saint Francis, an account that stresses the fantastic aspects of the saint's legend. The Fourfold Sense alludes to the saint's corporeal sensations and to the medieval Christian method of interpreting texts on multiple levels.

A resident of San Francisco, Waterston was particularly drawn to stories of the extreme asceticism of the saint, who lay himself bare to nature's forces, wreaking torture on his body as a means of spiritual transformation. The artist's allusive and gestural imagery--by turns abstract, figural, and biomorphic--conveys the visionary dimensions of the saint's experience in the artist's prints and paintings on this theme.