Charis (Grace) Kairos (Time), takes the methods Fujimura developed for his Soliloquies series, which exhibited his large scale works with Modernist master Georges Rouault’s paintings. Taking Rouault’s indelible images as a cue, Fujimura decided to start with a dark background, to illumine the darkness with prismatic colors.

I painted the five large-scale images that illuminate this volume, The Four Holy Gospels, using water-based Nihonga materials (Japanese style painting), with my focus on the tears of Christ (John 11) – tears shed for the atrocities of the past century and for our present darkness.

Charis is a series of paintings I did in 2008 (I had a major exhibit in NYC at Dillon Gallery, titled ‘Charis’), so the painting is already part of a greater body of works. This particular series is called Charis-Kairos, and I do mean it in the sense of the original Greek of ‘grace time.’ ‘The Tears of Christ’ is a subtitle given to this particular work for the Four Holy Gospels project, so it is not a direct translation of the Greek, but an additional title given to the piece. I will be creating other ‘Charis-Kairos’ works in the future with different subtitles.