(Fugaku sanjurokkei: Kanagawaoki namiura).
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
Woodblock print from Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Fuji, Edo period.
I can look and stare at this particular wave for hours together (in fact I have done so many a time) but it is a curious fact that I always end up thinking of the fate of the fishermen & their boats in the aftermath of the wave.... Their end is almost assured.. It fills me with meloncholy just gazing at death like that. How utterly poweless human beings are against the power of Nature when it unleashes its force.
Everytime I look at this print of this amazing wood block, I half expect the wave to crash down in all its maelovalent fury and swamp the 3 boats floundering in the raging sea.
The wave looks almost alive to me full of the untold power , you can almost see the latent energy captured in the frothing wavelets their edges poised like talons just waiting to engulf the helpless fishermen & their boats. . The wave looks looks all the more ferocious as it dwarfs Fuji - San (Mt. Fuji) reducing it to a mere hill.
I am as always in awe of this moment of arrested motion that the artist has succeeded in communicating through his work. The fall of the swamping wave looks inevitable . A brief moment in time captured beautifully poised as it seems on the edge of disaster.
Hokusai was a master of the "ukiyo - e" (pictures of the floating world) and left a formidable legacy of more than 30,000 examples of his works. Among them his 13 volume sketchbook MANGA (Random Sketches) as well as the series of block prints colectively known as THE THIRTY VIEWS OF Mt. FUJI from which series this print is taken.
Hokusai's over 30,000 works, including silk paintings, woodblock prints, picture books, manga, travel illustrations, erotic illustrations, paintings, and sketches. Some of his paintings were public spectacles which measured over 200 sq. meters (2,000 sq. feet.) He didn't care much for being sensible or social respect; he signed one of his last works as "The Art-Crazy Old Man". In his 89 years, Hokusai changed his name some thirty times (Hokusai wasn't his real name) and lived in at least ninety homes.
His work deeply impressed even Western Impressionists like Van Gogh, Degas, Monet among others he was one oriental artist who bridged the gap to western artists...
Hokusai must be imagined as a person who was completely obsessed by producing ukiyo-e prints. He lived for nothing else. He usually got up early in the morning and worked until after sunset. The art name Gakyo-rojin, which he used from 1834-1849 means old man mad with painting.
And this is what he wrote about himself in his autobiography. It is the quintessence of his art philosophy:
"From the age of five I have had a mania for sketching the forms of things. From about the age of fifty I produced a number of designs, yet of all I drew prior to the age of seventy there is truly nothing of great note. At the age of seventy-two I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish and of the vital nature of grasses and trees. Therefore, at eighty I shall have made some progress, at ninety I shall have penetrated even further the deeper meaning of things, at one hundred I shall have become truly marvelous, and at one hundred and ten, each dot, each line shall surely possess a life of its own. I only beg that gentlemen of sufficiently long life take care to note the truth of my words."
