About Hokusai & Me...and, finally, Monet
Now that I am 81, I like contemplating images and texts created by other old folks, like Hokusai. When he celebrated his 75th birthday, Hokusai wrote:
From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice.?
At seventy- three years, I was able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish.?
Thus when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will seem as though alive.?
Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine prove not false. Told by Gakyō _Rōjin Manji
Translated by Henry Smith, in Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, page 7.
To imitate Hokusai:
When I was fifty, I had published more than two dozen books, pioneered online help for Apple, exhibited conceptual art and concrete poetry in New York galleries, and coached almost a thousand professional writers entering the computer field.?One day, having worked with Hiraku Amemiya and Nagatoshi Inagaki in training Japanese technical writers to adjust to the expectations of Western audiences, I took a day off and went to the Tokyo National Museum, in Ueno Park. In Room 10 of the Honkan galleries, I found Hokusai among the “floating world prints” (ukiyo-e) and fashions from the 17th through the 19th century.?In that dim space his work jumped off the wall.
Condemned by many critics as not truly representative of Japanese art, his landscapes mix techniques from Dutch copper plate engravings, Chinese paintings, and an eclectic group of design studios in Edo, as Tokyo was known in the 19th century. These cheap commercial prints, available for the price of a bowl of noodles, bursting with vivid blue and white images, spotted with red, green, pink, and grey, outshone the scrolls and fans nearby, which had far more subtle wabi sabi. Nothing here was meditative, melancholy, simple, or even natural, like the flecks of sumi ink flung off from a brush stroke.?These are prints, mechanically reproduced.?Instead of showing a single monk on a large scroll, these relatively small pictures are jammed with many people at work.?And these are not kabuki actors, or demons, or warriors. Ordinary life, then, caught on the run: these people are mid-stride, turning, climbing, setting fires, sawing wood, stacking lumber, fishing.?How alive they seem!
I wanted the whole series.?In the gift store, I found a brown linen-bound box of postcards of the entire 36 Views of Mount Fuji, totalling, of course, 46 images.?I slipped the ivory stick, unfolded the cord that sealed the lid, and took out the pack—hefty as a set of oversized playing cards.??
For months, I sat with the cards, writing poems about each one—a way to explore the images, and to imagine my way into Hokusai’s point of view.?Where did his attention go??How did he seize on one aspect of the scene, and assemble a cast of characters, showing how they might have all been in motion at one instant???
The pictures seem to show a real moment, but, upon examination, I began to realize they also brimmed with artifice, and deliberate fiction.?
Then, when I was sixty, I published these poems as a hypertext series. What does that mean? At the top of the web page I showed the Hokusai image, and below that, my text, sprinkled with links. Whenever the word?pine?showed up in one poem, for example, I made it into a link to the next poem that mentioned pine trees, and the next. I was showing verbally the thick interpenetration of the subjects—the repeated themes, you might call them, the subjects that Hokusai kept coming back to, such as bridges, streams, rivers, forests, and of course, Mount Fuji.?This dense thicket of interconnected links was, perhaps, a bit of a formal experiment, driven by my experiences at Apple creating a new form of documentation, now known as online help.?We had used HyperCard back then to create procedures and reference panels, each thought of as a separate card, held together with links from menus and highlighted phrases in the content.?
Hypertext makes visible the interwoven nature of content.?When Tim Berners-Lee came up with the HTML vocabulary and the IP protocols, his aim, originally, was to allow researchers to jump from a footnote in one report to the source document.?That simple action, clicking and going, is now second nature.?But when we were inventing online help back at Apple, we were wrestling with a new way of conceiving the organization of our material—as a network, not a document. And that was what my series was exploring.
Alas, my experiment put more emphasis on the links than the pictures.?And when you clicked, you arrived in the middle of the page, where the next instance of that word appeared, rather than at the top, where you could start reading.?The effect was staccato, and unsettling.?
Plus, I had not integrated the image and the text.?We’ve now become accustomed to memes where text and icons plop on top of the image, making a comment, or counterpoint—some meaningful mélange.?In the past, we thought of art as separate from poetry, complementary, perhaps, or mutually entangled, but still, distinct media.?No longer.??
With computers we can turn all types of content into electrons, allowing us to mix what used to be distinct media.?We build that interpenetration with apps that allow quick videos, short messages, memes. But the designers of museum web sites, art magazines, and critical books stick to the traditional distinction: the reproduction of the artwork stands separate from the text about it.?
To me, that separation bangs up against the nature of the tools we are using—the digital data, the algorithmic code, the brilliant hardware, which together define our work environment.?As a creator, I am indirectly collaborating with all these software and hardware engineers, and even though I am the “user,” their products help me capture, manipulate, integrate, transmit, and publish. How can I not be affected? And why not reflect that collaboration in my final output?
Thinking along these lines, I began to explore these revered images—digitally. I took my cue from Hokusai’s own practice.
Zooming
In picture after picture in the series,?36 Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai invites us to keep zooming in, searching for the little white triangle, the simple shape at the back. So I began by selecting images in the public domain, bringing them up in Photoshop, and magnifying.??
The original prints are roughly 10 x 15 inches (25.5 x 37.7 cm), for about 250 square inches of surface. I decided to make my remixes much larger, so I could examine details more closely.??
Where Hokusai fitted his drawings into a neat rectangle, with dimensions determined by the wood blocks used in printing, I gave myself more room.?In Photoshop, I created a blank canvas 24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm), for 1,056 square inches. To me, that square echoes the shape of a picture element (pixel)—the smallest addressable unit within the grid that makes up the monitor screen.
Then I enlarged the original image, sometimes by 100% or 200% or more, and slid it around on this canvas, so that only part of the original showed up—the part with Mount Fuji. At other times, I zoomed in even more, to look at the actual pixellation of the colors, when magnified in Preview, captured in a screenshot, and then enlarged some more.
Having zoomed way in, I pulled back to add, on top, a tiny version of the original, for comparison.?I wanted to encourage that movement back and forth, that activity, looking first at the blown-up detail, then squinting at the whole it was originally a part of.
Revising
Hokusai often revised his work.?We still have some of his first drafts, marked up with red ink, and then the final versions, showing that he was not afraid of completely redoing a drawing—and that he could reproduce much of the first draft in his second—quite a feat, given the intricate mesh of fine lines.?
The computer makes this kind of reconsideration, revision, and rethinking much easier for someone like me, even though I have little skill in drawing. So I often moved the thumbnail of the original picture around, on top of the gigantic detail, asking myself: Does it fit there??Does it disrupt our view of the detail? Where does it do the least damage to the section I have selected and enlarged?
Layering
When the block carvers made the key block, the one that outlined all the elements of the picture, they printed a proof for Hokusai.?He then marked it up to show them what colors should go where—dark blue at the top, for example, for sky, and light green for distant hills, perhaps.?Then the carvers made a separate block for each color, showing just the areas that required blue, say, or green.?The printer ran the key block first, getting the outlines of shapes down, then ran additional blocks to fill in each color.?
Hokusai, then, thought in layers—colors landing on top of outlined shapes, one after another.??
In Photoshop, I moved the thumbnail of the original around on one layer, without disturbing anything below it. And I sometimes added other thumbnails, other little details, other views of the original, all sliding around on their own layers, so that none of them erased or damaged anything else.
But because each image lived on its own layer, I was able to make some little images overlap others, suggesting that some recede from us, while others come forward, giving the illusion of depth. I got the idea from Hokusai who suggested fingers of fog between us and Mount Fuji, or inserted a hill half way between us and a beach.?
Layers let me build up a complex composition, giving the eye plenty to think about, as it interprets the intervening items, and figures out a path back through this undefined space to Mount Fuji, hiding in the distance.?
Imagining Depth?
Hokusai, too, draws us into the space of his pictures. At times he adopts the central perspective made popular by Dutch prints, showing, say, two rows of warehouses converging as they go back, getting smaller and smaller until they almost meet—but he interposes a tiny building, to make us imagine, but not see, the vanishing point.?At other times, he puts one element in front of another, in front of another, and so on, exaggerating what the Japanese call near/far (enkin no dosu) …again, giving us the sense that there must be quite a bit of distance between the item in the foreground, and the one in back.?Bridges, for instance, stand between us and whatever Hokusai shows us underneath the arch.??
Other times he inserts huge fingers of fog between us and Mount Fuji, fudging the distance, making it unclear how far away the mountain really is, but making us imagine the intervening geography.
I am not so illusionistic, but I too like to suggest depth. To draw the eye deep into the picture, I sometimes stack items so that some stand in front of others, persuading the mind to imagine moving, step by step, from the foreground to the background, even though the intervening spaces are poorly defined and ambiguous.?
Borrowing a technique from the Yamato-e tradition, Hokusai sometimes inserts cloud banks or fingers of fog between us and distant hills, making the wet air into distinct, clearly contoured objects.?This convention, known as?kumogata, is defiantly symbolic, suggesting more than showing, printlike more than painterly, simply blocking our view, but suggesting that there may many miles between us and Mount Fuji, poking up in the background.
For me, a patch of pixels, basically a screenshot of the original picture zoomed way, way in, can serve a similar role for me, creating an uncertain space that echoes the real, but in a way that is clearly abstract, not “realistic.”
Colors
At times, as a tribute to the black-and-white drawings that Hokusai submitted to the printers, I bleach all color out of the scene, to demonstrate the fine lines that Hokusai exulted in, challenging the men who had to carve those into the cherry wood blocks for printing.
The pre-publication advertisement for the?36 Views of Mount Fuji?stressed that they would be printed in blue (“aizuri ichimai”). And the first five prints were printed entirely in different saturations of the fashionable imported pigment, Prussian blue, to suggest the dim light of dawn. In the next pictures, he gradually added grey, green, black, and pink, as the sun came up.?The last 16 prints are full of light and bold colors.??And when all these prints went through numerous editions, different publishers and printers chose to accentuate the variety and contrasts between colors.?
A purist, then, would prefer the earliest possible impression of each print, some of which seem almost silhouettes in blue, compared with later printings.?Not me.?I respect the blue, but I have chosen the most vividly colored prints from the public domain, and started with those.?Why??I love color. But more, I find that the contrasts and highlights help clarify what we are looking at, and refresh the eye.??
But to give a nod to the blue versions, I occasionally take a small detail, and invert the colors, which tends to bring out the black contour lines as white, and switches “realistic” colors for night-time glow.?
Organizing
When Hokusai came to a new location, he had to decide where to sit, how much of the scene to capture, what to ignore, what to emphasize.?These compositional choices reflect a preference for scenes that offer many paths for attention to move through, different details that arouse our interest, opportunities to show numerous ordinary folks at work at their trades, oh, and natural beauty, too.?A complex agenda, then, for an artist arranging the elements of the picture into a plausible representation of a real scene.??
Consider the ways that Hokusai organizes those elements to intrigue our attention, to reward close examination, and to keep us exploring his picture, repeatedly.?(There’s real satisfaction to be had when our attention keeps being drawn through the picture along the same or similar paths, over and over.)
For example, he likes leading our eye on a zigzag trail back to Mount Fuji.?We see samurai racing the horses along that kind of path through rice paddies, or winds blasting the peasants struggling along a similar levee. We follow along.
Often, he sets up a big event off center, whether it is a wave, a tree, or a boat.?He likes strong diagonals, such as the gigantic beam that two men are sawing up into planks; it slashes across the page from the bottom right to the top left.?He repeats some forms—the triangles of roofs of peasant huts, the rolling folds of grassy hills, the series of waves underneath a cargo boat, the thousand tiny marks that represent rice plants—without organizing them into neat rows. As the eye contemplates, picking up the similarity, the mind weaves all of them into a rough pattern—not symmetrical, but “natural,” because the layout seems more like the way natural forms accrete.
In all these ways, Hokusai keeps our eyes a bit off balance, inquiring, seeking, discovering.??
Contrast that with his patches of precision, which suggest that he is accurately reproducing the entire scene.?He outlines the contours of forms with sharp, dark lines. His human figures, done with swift irregular lines, seem caught in the middle of an action, the caricatures given life by the dozens of lines showing knee, and hand, bend and back.
He sets the rolling curves of waves, hills, or clouds against the sharp straight lines and right angles of carefully detailed wooden structures—temples, shops, pleasure houses, viewing platforms, stacks of lumber. He clearly loves well-cut wood. In one of his manuals for beginning painters, he recommends using a ruler—a straight edge—and in many pictures we see the perfectly parallel lines between every plank in the floor, the isometric view of a shop or tea warehouse, the slats of a window or a outside wall, the posts and walls of a country inn. He just loves architecture, as a subject—and a foil to play off against the deliberately irregular, apparently random, tree trunks, leaf clusters, forests, streams, rivers, and the open sea.?
In these choices, Hokusai keeps us looking, as the mind seeks to resolve questions such as:?where are we standing, as we look at this scene??How far is it to Mount Fuji, which we assume to be the farthest point we can see??How do human structures live within the natural world??And, in between, what are the humans doing down there, so tiny in this complex landscape?
My own preference is for a similar mix of the precise and the ambiguous. I love pixels, zoomed way in, to show each colored square, but I take blocks of those to form a background, an interfering signal, an emotional mood.?These patches have a double life—as computer-perfect squares but also, blurry smears of color.
But I am reacting to Hokusai’s initial response.?And because I am not primarily representing something in the real world, I drift toward symmetry as a way of organizing the dozen or so elements in my picture.?I apologize if that makes it too easy to perceive.
Toward that end, I—and Hokusai—complexify the situation by adding text.
Texting
Hokusai inserts chunks of text throughout these prints, teasing us with the interplay of two forms of “reading.”?
The most obvious text elements appear within their own frame, appearing on top of the picture, separated from the image, but talking about it.?For example, the signature gives a brief biography, pointing out that the creator has changed his artist name from the widely known “Hokusai” to “Iitsu,” as in “Brush of Iitsu, the former Hokusai.”?The signature block, then, briefly breaks the illusion that we are just looking through a window at a real scene, reminding us that, yes, a bravura designer is at work here.?
The second element within the signature block is the title.?On the surface, this phrase tells us what location appears in the picture.?But not so fast.?Sometimes these titles are misleading; for example, when he announces that he is showing us the Seven Mile Beach in Sagami Province, he does not show us the beach.?Sometimes the title asserts a claim, but the scene is so unspecific that even his contemporaries could not point to a particular spot where he sketched.?At other times he is drawing a popular tourist spot, but doing so from an unfamiliar vantage point, among the rooftops, say, so he needs to use the title to explain where we are.?And many location names retain original meanings, giving a little touch of poetry to the scene; for example, Umezawa means, literally, a marsh full of plum trees.?These are not simple labels.?Appearing within the picture (as contrasted with the way Western artists exclude their titles, relegating them to labels in the gallery) Hokusai’s titles set off a subtle interplay between what we see and what it “means,” between our first impression and multiple ways of interpreting the print.
Within the scene, Hokusai includes street names, teahouse signs, advertisements for products being sold, such as a special tea, official government notices on their own kiosk, even a description of a guardian deity on the back of a shrine.?These texts give the scenes the air of real life, and veracity.??
But he breaks the illusion by including the name or trademark of his publisher on a kite, on clothing, a hat, boxes being carried across a river.?He even includes a full advertisement for the extended version, “New Edition of Thirty-Six Fuji in Stock.”??These marks and characters, easy to accept as just part of the scene, are, to the knowing customer, low-key reminders of the commercial process that brings us these prints.?
These prints, then, are very talkative.?Hokusai once argued, in a manual called?Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing?(1814) that because the brushstrokes that you learn to make in calligraphy are the same that you use in drawing, anyone who can write can draw.?An exaggeration, no doubt, but an idea that he pursued in more than a thousand?surimono, that is, works that combine a picture and a poem.?Some of these were created collaboratively with contemporary poets to share in poetry clubs, and the images take off from flowers, animals, seasons mentioned in the text, often obliquely illustrating or commenting on the text. Hokusai also created sets of prints about famous poets, showing what they looked like, and inserting part or all of one of their poems.??
But in the?36 Views, he leaves out poetry.?His tone is direct, empirical, practical; he is not reaching for overtones, spiritual suggestions, moral advice, or reminders of poems that formed part of the curriculum of a well-educated samurai or aristocrat.?The texts that make it into these pictures are, or appear to be, “just the facts,” about the scene, about himself, about the publication process, about commerce.
I have taken a more poetic approach, adding my own chunks of text to tell you what I think about the fragments of imagery that I have torn apart and reassembled.?I interrupt your vision of the whole.?I label, expand on what I see, cry out.?My verbal elements obscure some of the underlying image, and in turn, some of the shadows below make the letters difficult to make out.?Just as Hokusai is reflecting on what it means to view the mountain in the middle of the nation of Japan, I am pondering the experience of viewing him.?
I offer multiple chunks of text, so they can be read in any order, as the eye jumps around the image.?In fact, I hope that different overtones and possible meanings arise as you tour the texts from one direction, then another.?I first started doing this kind of “scattered” writing when I was in graduate school, perhaps under the influence of psychedelics. Several of these spatially laid-out and non-sequential poems ended up being published as “concrete poetry.” In fact, a six-panel poem about Charles Ives became album notes for a record set. As with my hypertext experiments, I aim to offer multiple paths through the material, each path suggesting, hopefully, a slightly different perspective on the subject.??
Circling Mount Fuji
Hokusai made landscape a valid subject for art in Japan.?No more kabuki actors, mythical warriors, Zen monks.?He’d done all those, before.?Now he turned to the sights that were becoming popular with middle class tourists, landmarks that, when assembled in a series, showed the beauty and vitality of the nation, as defined in a new way—not as a feudal society, but a land full of workers, not a Kyoto of temples and palaces, but a natural land full of waterfalls, bridges, rivers, and, yes, that one big mountain, Mount Fuji.??
A new attitude toward the notion of Japan, then…and a way to celebrate the visible, the tangible, the accessible.?Not hidden palaces, or ancient texts, not even the warriors that Hokusai had so often portrayed when illustrating popular novels. A volcano, dormant under snow for three quarters of the year, available to pilgrims and tourists every summer—that was the symbol, the mark that Hokusai chose.
In his day, you could see Mount Fuji from Tokyo.?Travelers bought guidebooks to the sights along the major highways that had been set up, long before, for the daimyos and their retainers to come serve the shogun.?Hokusai saw the commercial possibilities of illustrating those scenic outlooks, those must-see views, and his competitors soon followed his path, doing their own series of prints on the natural wonders of the country.?But Hokusai made Mount Fuji his trademark.
The advertisement for the?36 Views?boasted that “These pictures show the form of Fuji as it differs depending on the place, such as the shape seen from Shichirigahama, or the view observed from Tsukudajima: he has drawn them all so that none are the same.” (Guth translation)
The idea of circling around the mountain, too, is his. Like a string of prayer beads, his prints repeat that one mountain, the one constant in the middle of all the different vistas, and, at the same time, a shape shifter, growing taller then smaller, brighter or darker, white, red, bland or bright.??
Mount Fuji had erupted in 1707, and might do so again; but for all its volatility, it was considered immortal. One popular etymology of its name traced “fuji” back to “fu-shi” meaning “no death.”?Pilgrims came every summer, making the climb, with the hope that they might attain immortality, or at least long life.?Did Hokusai subscribe to these beliefs, or did he just figure it was good luck to celebrate an emblem of the long life he hoped for, when he publicly planned his artistic progress up to the age 110?
Hokusai had long identified with the North Star, as the embodiment of the Boddhisatva Myōken. One night, after spending three weeks in a retreat at her temple, he emerged during a storm, and was struck by lightning.?He recovered, and believed his survival was due to her intervention. He is said to have recited her mantra continuously as he walked around the city. All his artist names refer, in one way or another, to her.
To have a miraculous redeemer, whose emblem was an immovable presence in the constantly changing night sky, what did this mean for Hokusai??It seems, at least as a form of spiritual practice, that he was concentrating on a single point, as he moved around.?Perhaps Mount Fuji served as a similar symbol to concentrate on, to bring good luck, blessing, and immortality.
To perform some spiritual practices such as reciting a mantra, focusing on a single point, or sharpening the attention, one must stay in the “now.”?And Hokusai’s pictures give that impression.?We get the feeling that we are witnessing a living moment.?Not a religious mood, not a worship of a far-off being, but a real, tangible, visible fact, around which a whole moment can turn.?
Making an impression
Hokusai borrowed techniques from Western prints and Chinese art, but he does not seem to have intended his work for export.?Yet his prints quickly became shorthand for Japan around the world, more popular than the more subtle screens and scrolls made by the literati, the Zen monks, and the artists trained in traditional schools.
Twenty years after his death, Hokusai’s prints were at the center of a craze for all things Japanese,?Japonisme, which seems to have started in France after the United States opened Japan up for trade. Paris then saw a flood of imports and exhibitions bringing ukiyo-e prints, kimonos, Buddhas, scrolls, fans, and other exotic goods that appealed to critics like the Goncourt brothers, novelists such as Zola, and artists such as Manet.?
And, led by Claude Monet, the Impressionists seized on Hokusai and Hiroshige for alternatives to the slick, dead conventions of the French Academy. Just as Hokusai grabbed some techniques from the Dutch prints that were being brought into Japan in the 18th century, Monet and his group felt encouraged in their own experiments by what they discovered in Hokusai and the other ukiyo-e artists.
? Contemporary life as a subject, crowds in the city, real people out in the countryside (as opposed to shepherds and nymphs in pastoral never-never lands)
? Working out doors in the open air, so that images contained more natural light than the dim shadows of a studio, and weather became part of the scene.?Hokusai sketched on the spot, but built his pictures in the studio using those sketches to create a scene that looked as if it had been created on location.?Monet went much farther in working right in the motif, though he retouched afterward, and later in his life, created some canvases purely in the studio.?For both artists, though, the goal was to give us the illusion of seeing a real scene, out in the open, not a fantasy worked up indoors.
? Making each brushstroke visible: Hokusai’s innumerable marks, dabs, dashes—indicating, variously, rice plants, trees, hills, or waves—encouraged these impressionists to leave their own brushwork visible, rather than smoothing it over as the Academy recommended.
? Bright colors caught the attention of both artists and collectors, tired of the dark browns and varnished shadows that the Academy equated with beauty.
? Scale: unlike the gigantic canvases that won imperial or ecclesiastical awards, the smaller, more portable canvases used by the Impressionists found an odd justification in the small ukiyo-e prints, both aiming at a middle class audience of artisans, merchants, professionals, in their apartments and homes, rather than the wealthy with their palaces, and the state, with its grand buildings.
? Tourism: the idea that an image could help city dwellers envision a scene that they might like to visit on a weekend, and the sense that a series of prints could give you a tour around a major landmark, may have helped Monet justify his own travels around France, and his multiple views of its cathedrals, valleys, cliffs, haystacks, and rivers.
Influence can be exaggerated.?Some problems that the Impressionists were trying to solve would have seemed alien to Hokusai—how to capture the multiple colors that show up in shadows, for example, or how to represent the irregular shapes and changing colors of ripples and waves.?These challenges could only be addressed in oil paint, something that Hokusai never touched. A print, even one with several layers of overprinting, cannot show such subtleties.
Hokusai, then, was not an Impressionist, but many avant-garde French critics and artists mis-appropriated his work as an exotic but understandable justification for a constellation of practices and ideas that were grouped loosely under that rubric.?And that raises the question: In what ways did Hokusai make his work amenable to this interpretation???
Yes, each print seems like it captures a moment—a fleeting impression of a particular place at a specific time of day, in a particular season, with its own wind, rain, or mist.?We see people tilting forward, taking a step, holding a bucking horse, carrying buckets of tea leaves—almost no one is at rest in a Hokusai.?The wind lifts a kite and twists its tail.?The porters splash across a river, bearing the daimyo and his luggage.?Nothing is at rest.?Hence, the impression that we are seeing an instant. If cameras had been invented, we might call these scenes photographic.
But each picture is a personal reinvention of the scene.?Hokusai violates the laws of perspective at times by making a distant person larger than a nearby one.?He assembles half a dozen people as if they all just happened to be walking by at the same time—though I suspect each individual figure, sketched on the spot, got dropped into the picture to give us his own personal impression of busy human activity.?
So an impression can also be artificial, as when we say someone is trying to make an impression on us. Hokusai relies on the conventions of both Chinese and Japanese art to represent objects that are impossible to represent in the tools he had available—lines and marks like those in calligraphy, and solid blocks of color, caught in a motionless print. Real waves, for instance, swell with a gradient of colors, changing as they move, folding as they trip over the rising beach, receding—all that activity gets frozen into claw-like fractals in Hokusai’s wave off Kanagawa.?Similarly, evanescent, amorphous, moving clouds get turned into white blocks that just sit still in the print, blocking our view of whatever lies behind them.?Real rice plants are green, but get represented by innumerable little black slash marks.?We “read” these conventional representations well enough; we accept the translation from the real to the metaphorical, while recognizing that, well, this is a summary, not a full representation.?In that sense, we accept these aspects of the picture as “just” an impression.
In all these ways, then, Hokusai’s art makes an impression on us; the images capture our attention, exercise it by drawing us through the landscape over and over, discovering new information as we go, leaving the overall “impression” in our brain.
And the art is literally made on a press, because professional wood carvers laid Hokusai’s sketches on blocks of cherry, and cut his lines in the wood, making an impression on that block, which then served as the bed on which the printer laid mulberry paper, and pressed down, to make the final impression.
In my work, I create on the computer, and print on aluminum. Today’s printing processes allow me to capture the full range of colors, and the 300 pixels per inch resolution, so that the image that emerges has more than 64,000 hues available, and lines as thin as one pixel width.?For me, then, printing is not nearly as limiting as it was for Hokusai. But I cannot pretend to be sketching a scene in 19th century Japan.?My pieces are aggressively artificial: disassembling the original Hokusai print, rebuilding it, inserting my commentary, arguing with the dead, interacting with images, not real people or mountains.??
I am giving you my “impression” of Hokusai, asserting that my pictures are conversations, not final statements.
--Jonathan Reeve Price
Images in this series:
In this project, I take off from each picture in Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji, plus the extras he added when customers asked for more. I look at each original, then offer a visual and textual exploration of questions such as:
领英推荐
Please skim down this set of thumbnails to spot a picture you might want to explore, then click through to read my poem about it, and my own visual remix. Or get the complete set in the book,?Viewing Hokusai Viewing Mount Fuji.
About the Book
ISBN-10: 0-9719954-7-8?
ISBN-13: 978-0-9719954-7-5
76 pages, full color