Review of Gaston Petit - The Kimono and the Cross

Gaston Petit - The Kimono and the Cross

Gaston Petit is a Quebec artist who has produced hundreds of paintings, lithographs and art objects. So why have many culture minded Quebecers never heard of him?

One obvious reason is that for the last 40-odd years, he has worked in Tokyo. He's well enough known and admired in Japan that the emperor's cousin commissioned him to design some stained-glass windows.

But Petit, who's now 72, has another vocation as well. He's a high ranking Roman Catholic Dominican priest. There's probably not another Shawinigan-born boy who's gone quite so far. (Well, maybe one.) Certainly no Shawinigonian who speaks better Japanese.

If the Dominican order ever needed a poster boy, Petit could fit the bill. He personifies the Dominicans' philosophy, described by Petit in this book, of balance between meditation and action. Athletic and handsome as a teenager and, by his own account, popular with the girls, at 17 he freely chose the religious life.

Secular-minded people who despise rules of conduct of any kind might think that the constraints of a religious order limit one from living life to the full.

Petit's case is a pretty good argument to the contrary. For a quick, perceptive mind like his, what could be more stimulating than the order's classical education (Greek and Latin) and a chance to travel widely, not only to Japan--a destination he targeted early on--but to many fascinating parts of the world like INdia, Easter Island, and pre-Taliban Afghanistan.

His vocation opened doors to hundreds of friends (including a reunion with his former Shawinigan classmate, Jean Chretien) and scores of intriguing, famous people, like the Dalai Lama.

It's evident from his words in the book that Petit has an engaging personality and likes to socialize (a trait shared with his father, a salesman). These qualities were confirmed by another long-time Tokyo resident from Quebec who knew Petit there and who recalled for his review that he was also adept at promoting himself and his artistic career.

Petit may be a priest, but he's not unworldly. Certainly, the book shows evidence of his gift for diplomacy, a useful skill in Japan, where, as Petit explains, etiquette has a myriad nuances.

Natural-born iconoclasts will savour the moments, however, when Petit is outspoken and revisionist, as when he chides St. Augustine for being the culprit who mistakenly identified the evil in Eve's apple as sex. Christianity, Petit admitted, as yet to survive that one.

At the same time, there are many instances when Petit scurries to act as a Christian apologist. Here his arguments sound forced, as though he's trying hard to reconcile Christianity with the Far Eastern theologies, like Buddhism, that he so admires.

The reader senses--and Petit admits--that he could say much more on these subjects if he had the chance. This brings us to the book's major weakness: it's format. It's simply a transcribed series of question-and-answer sections. Everything Petit said appears to get equal treatment, and a lot of banal information got left in. Weak editing has also left in long passages in which Petit sounds like an art lecturer (which he was) or like Joseph Campbell explaining the significance of mythological symbols. More than once Petit questioned whether what he'd just said was worth quoting. Smart man.

Judicious editing in the photo selection, too, might have given us fewer Gaston-here, Gaston-there snapshots. Better to have satisfied readers' curiosity by showing the Dominican mission in Tokyo's Shibuya district, where he has lived.

A small number of colour reproductions reveal some of his work's obvious stylistic influences: fauvism, surrealism, abstract expressionism. On this evidence, his work, though intelligent and sensitive, apparently never achieved and unmistakably personal style. It takes nothing away from his accomplishments to say that he's a derivative rather than a seminal artist. Although Petit speaks eloquently about contemporary aesthetics, his own approach to art is the medieval one in which art serves liturgical purposes. His art objects are intended for use rather than for isolated viewing, which explains his numerous commissions for churches: stained-glass windows, liturgical garments and murals like the 3,500-kilogram bronze made for a church in Nagasaki.

In recent years, Petit has spent summer months in Quebec. On May 25, an exhibition of his work opens in Trois-Rivieres. If you can't make it there, you might catch his show in Tokyo in September.

In the meantime, this book, despite its flaws, lets us glimpse an unusual Quebecer of high culture and inspiring humanitarianism. How comforting to know that such people are among us.


— Victor Swoboda The Montreal Gazette

More Reviews of this title

Gaston Petit - The Kimono and the Cross

Art. Cross. Japan. Quebec. Saskatchewan. Priesthood. Creativing writing. If you entered these key words into an INternet search engine, it might come up with the names Father Gaston Petit and Linda Ghan, but what would prompt you to do the key word search if you didn't already know Father Petit and Linda Ghan, and how would you know htem already if you hadn't read this book?

Father Gaston Petit is a Dominican priest from Shawinigan, Que., who, since 1966, has been stationed in Japan, where he practices as an artist, a painter, a sculptor, a stained glass designer, a silkscreen printer, and a wood block printer.

Linda Ghan is a broadcaster, a teacher, and a creative writer from Weburn, Sask., who is currently head of the Canadian Studies program at Ibaraki University in Japan.

Their paths cross not only in Japan and Canada but also in the Mystery of the Cross that is Father Petit's observance as a priest and his career as a visual artist who exercises much control over his means of production and who shares the means of production with Ghan in this book.

The Kimono and the Cross comprises a series of interviews with Father Petit that Ghan conducted over a two-year period by telephone and e-mail and in person. Her questions tend to be brief and soft, straight-lines designed to let Father Petit talk, which he does, about his family history and upbringing, about his vocation as a priest, and about artists and his own art.

Father Petit gives long answers, not, I presume, because he likes to talk endlessly about himself as his favourite topic, but because, again I must presume, he has a need to talk, to tell.

As he himself observes, "Human conversation. The conversation of women. Woman, medieval or contemporary, the pious and the profane, have a need to talk, to be listened to." He talks as if in answer to an invitation from a woman, and Ghan listens as if she has all the time in the world.

Father Petit and the world cross many times in his answers, with reference, for example, to his travels to the sites of giant works of art; the giant temple at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, the giant Buddhas of Afghanistan (now destroyed), the giant drawings in the Narca Desert, Peru, the giant heads of Easter Island. In all of these sites, Father Petit cites himself as an artist.

His most fascinating comments are about art. Rather than formulating an aesthetics, Father Petit speaks informally. Whatever he says is interesting to listen to because he is an artist and also a priest.

As an artist, as i imagine, he makes statements like "Conscious of it or not, an artist is pushed by the desire to leave something to humanity." but as a priest he likes to add theological comments such as, "The true artist aims at participating, by analogy, obviously, in God's creating power. He dresses himself in the Creator's vestments."

In fact, these interviews are a kind of verbal vesting exercise, in an artist's smock and a priest's cassock.


— Paul Matthew St. Pierre The B.C. Catholic

Gaston Petit - The Kimono and the Cross

Gaston Petit is many things, but conventional is not one of them. A Dominican priest who, far from being cloistered, has wandered the globe with an almost compulsive hunger to learn about other cultures and beliefs, Petit is also an artist who by his own account has "participated in almost all of the large juried international biennial exhibitions since the end of the 1960s."

A Canadian who spends half the year in his home province of Quebec, Petit has been based in Japan since the early 1960s. In Gaston Petit: The Kimono and The Cross, author Linda Ghan has compiled two years of telephone, email, and face-to-face interviews with Petit, covering everything from his childhood in the small town of Trois-Rivieres to his religious and aesthetic philosophies. The result is a tantalizing glimpse of a man with a love of learning, whose convictions and curiosities run deep.

Ghan introduces Petit through his reminiscences of a happy childhood in a family of strong religious faith and even stronger ties--his first paint brushes were made with his mother and sister's hair. Now 73, Petit takes obvious pleasure in recollecting the innocent pleasures of his youth, including visits to his grandparents' farm and a Boy Scout ski trip that nearly ended in hypothermia.

The tone here is nostalgic rather than revelatory, but the roots of Petit's instinct to "avoid dichotomy" are traceable in these early years. This, along with the conviction he retained from his youth "that life is worth living fully," offer some insight into the ease with which the adult Petit embodies the apparent contradictions of his two callings and cultures.

His later musings, which form the bulk of the book, are more substantial. They are of a philosophical as well as theological nature and reflect Petit's interests in everything from Hinduism to existentialism, which he says "helped me understand my own spiritual and theological concepts better."

Certainly, his belief in both his religion and his art is profound and he sees the two as inextricably intertwined: "Religion, the faith I belong to, is indissolubly linked with my art." His thoughts on these subjects are the real matter of Ghan's work, and she indulges in several fairly extended passages in which Petit lectures on everything from Classicism to Cambodia. Some of the lengthier passages could have done with more stringent editing, but the book's casual structure allows for overlap and tangents that make even the weighty material surprisingly accessible.

In keeping with this casual approach, Ghan seems to have been reluctant to cut from her interviews and often incorporates elements of the conversation that Petit does not seem to have intended for publication. The effect can be appealing, but more often feels disingenuous, as when she repeatedly quotes Petit asking things like, "You're not going to put all this in, are you?"

The format is an odd one to have chosen for an artist who, although well known in his field, is hardly a household name. A more conventional biography might have provided additional insight, as the interview format fails to provide perspectives other than the artist's. As a result, although Petit speaks with great erudition and candour, his responses give little sense of the man behind either the artist or the priest.

This book will be of real interest to those who know Petit or his art, but may have less appeal for the uninitiated. However, in choosing a subject who is, in his own words, "between earth and sky, sensuality and spirituality, action and thought, art and faith," Ghan has provided those who are interested with a fascinating window into the life and beliefs of a man less ordinary.


— Annabel Wright The Daily Yomiuri

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