Page 29 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa (from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji c1831)
Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa (from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji c1831). This is at once the most familiar of Hokusai’s works, and one of the most subtle and brilliantly constructed - both as a drawing, and as a print. The two portraits include his self portrait (left) and a head and shoulders of him by his daughter (right). It is significant that all three of these works are created when Hokusai is over 70 years old. Although he was prolific throughout his life (he began to draw everyday at age 6), it is probably his latter period (he lived to 89) that was the most refined both in draughtmanship and in woodblock technique. Although Hokusai served an apprenticehip with the famous artist-printer Katsukawa Shunsh (who made and sold printed portraits of the celebrity actors and courtesans of the Edo ‘floating world’of restaurants, theatres, nightclubs, brothels - the so-called ukiyo-e style.Most of Hokusai’s prolific output of prints were made professionally -his drawings were glued onto planks of wood and carved into separate plates (one for each colour) by skilled craftsmen- printers, then skillflly printed in register - often with Hokusai supervising the inking and printing of the plates. Hokusai lived through the period in which Japan was opening up to western influences, and some of his later work reflects this.
The impact of work by Hokusai, and his other talented artist-contemporaries, must have been spectacular. Artists including Van Gogh, Gauguin, James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and many others avidly collected these 'cheap and cheerful' prints (they were even used for wrapping precious ceramics) - often the first Japanese art they had seen. They had an equally spectacular effect on how western artists began to perceive space and the two-dimensionality of the canvas or paper they were creating upon. And conversely, the impact of western art (especially vanishing-point perspective) on Japan can be seen in this Mount Fuji series - the mountain is seen, diminished in perspective, in the centre of this composition, its solidity and stability contrasted with the wildly breaking waves almost engulfing the two light double-ender fish-delivery boats in the foreground.
“From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.” (Hokusai Katsushika)