The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, by Hokusai

Everyone has seen this print by Japanese ukiyo-e master Hokusai. A huge wave is crashing down. Mount Fuji stands in contrast serene on the horizon. Fast, urgent, dangerous action in the foreground. Unchanging permanence in the background.

Many people don’t immediately see the fishermen struggling in their long boats to stay alive. One boat is already almost torn apart from previous waves; this is going to be the one that finishes them off. The men in the boats are terrified, holding on for dear life. Their lives are just a moment in the life of Fujiyama. Here, gone, forgotten, but remembered by Hokusai, made immortal in this print.

Hokusai said that “All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account“. He didn’t believe in permanence. Hokusai changed his name thirty times, and moved whenever his current residence got too messy. His ukiyo-e series of woodblock prints, Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji, was completed when he was 71. He lived until he was 90. He figured if he’d lived to 110, that every dot or line he brushed would be alive.

I talked yesterday about how I made this print with Hueforge. Hueforge prints in twenty-seven very thin layers, thin enough that you can see some of the previous layer through the upper layer. Black prints first, then blue, light blue, gray, orange and finally white. The finished print has a dimensionality around it. You can run your fingers over it, feel the different layers. The white on top, the depths and valleys of the wave itself.

This was the opposite of how Hokusai made the prints. The white was the white of the paper; what he printed was the negative spaces. The first layer must have been the dark part of the wave and Mt. Fuji, then over that the Prussian blue of the spray, then the umber of the boats and the clouds, then finally the dark outlines, the artist’s signature (By Hokusai, known as Jitsu, it reads), the grasping claws of the deadly wave as it begins to crash down on the fishermen, and they do look like claws. Without this final print, the scene might look serene. This last one makes it a tragedy.

When I was a kid, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings were a punchline to every joke about modern art. Nowadays, it’s “Banana Duct-Taped to a Wall”, but back then, “my kid could do this better!”. They’d have paintings by monkeys and elephants and call them better than Pollocks. And I couldn’t see how this was art.

I have to tell you that I was emotionally devastated when I went down to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw them for myself. The paint doesn’t sit flat on the canvas; it’s thick. The entire painting is alive. If I were blind, and it were permitted, I could run my fingers over the canvas and get an idea of what it was conveying. (Same thing with the Hokusai 3D print). Like the Great Wave, One: Number 31, 1950 is chaos frozen in time. Even looking again at this picture I took years ago (with my daughter right up against it), it’s like a stormy sea with rain pelting down and lightning everywhere. It’s chaotic and dangerous and lucky for us, trapped and frozen in the canvas. It’s awesome and frightening. Kids should be protected from it. PG-13.

There’s a lot of ways to appreciate art. 3D printing a copy is probably the stupidest, maybe. But holding that little card-sized reproduction of the Great Wave Off Kanagawa, with its physicality and immediacy, helped me make a connection to that artist from almost two hundred years ago, and to another one from seventy five years ago.

I can’t wait to get back to MoMA to see Pollock again. All of Hokusai’s prints are collected in the Smithsonian down in DC, but DC isn’t a friendly place these days. Some day.