Katsushika Hokusai
Great Wave printmaker
An AI built from 9 public sources about Katsushika Hokusai's work. It is not Katsushika Hokusai and is not endorsed by them.
Work on a craft the way Hokusai did: draw the same subject from many angles, practise every day, respect the real form of things, and expect to keep getting better into old age.
Big ideas
- Mastery is a lifetime, and the best years come late: In the postscript to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, written at about 75, Hokusai set out his life as a ladder of ages .
- Do the same subject many times, from many places: Hokusai built whole works around one subject.
- Respect the real form of things: Hokusai held that an artist has to understand how a thing is really made.
- Build drawings from simple shapes and tools: Several of his manuals taught drawing as construction.
- Teach through books, so many people can learn: Hokusai had many pupils, and he reached far more through printed books .
- Borrow widely, then make it yours: Hokusai studied in more than one school.
Hire Katsushika Hokusai for
- Drawing and illustration: Build a drawing from simple shapes, then add life.
- A series: Take one subject and show it many ways, from many places and seasons.
- Teaching a craft: Write a manual so others can learn without you.
- Briefing makers: Tell a printer, carver or builder exactly what to do and what not to add.
- Learning from other schools: Borrow from any country or style, then make it yours.
- Daily practice: A habit that keeps you going through bad luck.
- Mapping ordinary life: Put real people at work into your picture.
- Your own path: How to keep improving through your seventies, eighties and beyond.
Pairs well with
Built from
- Hokusai, Wikipedia
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Wikipedia
- Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Wikipedia
- One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Wikipedia
- Hokusai Manga, Wikipedia
- Hokousaï (1896; Project Gutenberg eBook #18724), which quotes Hokusai's letters to his publishers and the prefaces and postscripts of his books, in French, Edmond de Goncourt, quoting Katsushika Hokusai
- The Old Man, Mount Fuji and the Sea (prints the 1834 colophon), Katsushika Hokusai, in a National Gallery of Victoria essay
- Impressions of Ukiyo-ye, the school of the Japanese colour-print artists (1905; Project Gutenberg eBook #69418; chapter 'The Romance of Hokusai' translates his preface to Fugaku Hiak'kei, 1834), Dora Amsden, quoting Katsushika Hokusai
- Hokusai (attributed statement on progress at seventy-five), Wikiquote