Re: Hokusai Mountains And Water Flowers And Birds Downloads Torrent
Savage Doherty
Hokusai, Japan's best known artist, is ironically Japan's least Japanese artist. Japan's best known woodblock painting, The Great Wave, is very un-Japanese. Welcome to the artist often known as Hokusai.
Hokusai (1760-1849) lived during the Tokugawa period (1600 to 1867).In a Japan of traditional Confucian values and feudal regimentation,Hokusai was a thoroughly Bohemian artist: cocky, quarrelsome, restless,aggressive, and sensational. He fought with his teachers and was oftenthrown out of art schools. As a stubborn artistic genius, he wassingle-mindedly obsessed with art. Hokusai left 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 200sq. meters (2,000 sq. feet.) He didn't care much for being sensible orsocial respect; he signed one of his last works as "The Art-Crazy OldMan". In his 89 years, Hokusai changed his name some thirty times(Hokusai wasn't his real name) and lived in at least ninety homes. Welaugh and recognize him as an artist, but wait, that's because we seehim as a Western artist, long before the West arrived in Japan.
Hokusai Mountains And Water Flowers And Birds Downloads Torrent
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"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes ofthings. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but allI have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with.At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature,of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I ameighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my waydeeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be amarvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, aline, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going tolive as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this inmy old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self'The Old Man Mad About Drawing." -- Hokusai
Hokusai started out as a art student of woodblocks and paintings.During the 600-year Shogun period, Japan had sealed itself off from therest of the world. Contact with Western culture was forbidden.Nevertheless, Hokusai discovered and studied the European copper-plateengravings that were being smuggled into the country. Here he learnedabout shading, coloring, realism, and landscape perspective. Heintroduced all of these elements into woodblock and ukiyo-e art andthus revolutionized and invigorated Japanese art.
Although Chinese and Japanese paintings had been using long distancelandscape views for 1,500 years, this style had never entered thewoodblock print. Ukiyo-e woodblocks were produced for bourgeoisie citygentry who wanted images of street life, sumo wrestlers, and geishas.The countryside and peasants were ignored.
In Holland in the late 1500s, artists such as Claes Jansz Visscherand Willem Buytewech developed landscape art, which focused ontopographically-correct landscape representation. Landscape art reachedits peak between 1630 and 1660 through Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob vanRuisdael, and Jan van Goyen. By the late 1700s, these Dutch paintingshad become so common that the etchings were used as cheapillustrations. Dutch merchants smuggled their goods into Japan. Thesewares were often wrapped in paper that had been illustrated with theseetchings. For Hokusai and other artists, the thrown-away wrappers weremore interesting than the imports.
Hokusai learned from Dutch and French pastoral landscapes with theirperspective, shading, and realistic shadows and turned them intoJapanese landscapes. More importantly, he introduced the serenity ofnature and the unity of man and his surroundings into Japanese popularart. Instead of shoguns, samurai, and their geishas, which were thecommon topics of Japanese illustrative art at the time, Hokusai placedthe common man into his woodblocks, moving the emphasis away from thearistocrats and to the rest of humanity. In The Great Wave, tiny humans are tossed around under giant waves, while enormous Mt. Fuji is a hill in the distance.
The Breaking Wave Off Kanagawa. Also called The Great Wave. Woodblock print from Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Fuji, which are the high point of Japanese prints. The original is at the Hakone Museum in Japan.
Hokusai's most famous picture and easily Japan's most famous imageis a seascape with Mt. Fuji. The waves form a frame through which wesee Mt. Fuji in the distance. Hokusai loved to depict water in motion:the foam of the wave is breaking into claws which grasp for thefishermen. The large wave forms a massive yin to the yang of emptyspace under it. The impending crash of the wave brings tension into thepainting. In the foreground, a small peaked wave forms a miniature Mt.Fuji, which is repeated hundreds of miles away in the enormous Mt. Fujiwhich shrinks through perspective; the wavelet is larger than themountain. Instead of shoguns and nobility, we see tiny fishermenhuddled into their sleek crafts as they slide down a seamount and divestraight into the wave to make it to the other side. The yin violenceof Nature is counterbalanced by the yang relaxed confidence of expertfishermen. Oddly, though it's a sea storm, the sun is shining.
To Westerners, this woodblock seems to be the quintessentialJapanese image, yet it's quite un-Japanese. Traditional Japanese wouldhave never painted lower-class fishermen (at the time, fishermen wereone of the lowest and most despised of Japanese classes); Japaneseignored nature; they would not have used perspective; they wouldn'thave paid much attention to the subtle shading of the sky. We like thepainting because it's familiar to us. This Japanese pastoral paintingoriginated in Western art: landscape, long-distance perspective,nature, and ordinary humans. The Giant Wave is actually a Westernpainting, seen through Japanese eyes.
Hokusai didn't merely use Western art. He transformed Dutch pastoralpaintings by adding the Japanese style of flattening and the use ofcolor surfaces as a element. By the the 1880's, Japanese prints werethe rage in Western culture and Hokusai's prints were studied by youngEuropean artists, such as Van Gogh, in a style called Japonaiserie.Thus Western painting returned to the West.
In this wave, the foam breaks up into a flock of birds. This wave isquite humorous; it disperses itself into wind. Without the boats andthe width of the other print, this work is not as dramatic. The tensionof the sea is drawn out through lines up the side of the wave.
With a swirl of plumes, the flock of roosters form a circle ofmotion, similar to many of Hokusai's water paintings. The birds areprecise and realistic. The woodblock could be a technical illustrationto a ornithologist's text on breeds of roosters. Hokusai was inspiredby European scientific illustrations and the European respect for thebeauty of Nature. The rooster at the right-middle has a very happy,contented expression. This is an example of Hokusai's bird-and-flowersillustrations.
This is an early example of Hokusai's landscapes. First of all, it'sset at a real location, the Sumida River. The trees are done withchiarscuro shading in the European style. But it's not entirelyrealistic: the water's waves are still in the Chinese stylized fashion.The perspective is also wrong: the tail of the boat is higher than thehouses behind it, and the boat appears to be above the house at thefront of the illustration. Hokusai is still experimenting and learningvarious elements, and hasn't yet begun to unify them. Note the playfulextension of the birdhouse out of the picture at the upper left.
By the time Hokusai began his Mt. Fuji series, he was able to unifyvast persepectives into calm paintings. Here, a boatload of passangersgaze at Mt. Fuji, in a quiet, plebian scene of ordinary people in theirdaily life. This realism is Hokusai's unique contribution to Japaneseart. This painting is from the 1840s, when Hokusai was already in his70s and fully developed in his artistic skill.
The courtesan is almost buried the weight of her luxuriouslytextured and detailed kimono. Hokusai pays attention to precision anddetail of the cloth. The important issue is the flattening of surfacesand the use of color fields. This became a major influence on Westernartists in the late 1800s into the 1900s.
Hokusai also drew thousands of small sketches. These are calledManga in Japanese. There are more than 15 volumes of Hokusai manga. Thefisherman and his load of tuna are delicately drawn inthree-dimensional perspective.
Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北齋) was an artist of such prodigious skill and imagination that it seems inadequate to discuss his achievements in anything less than a book-length exposition. Considered by many to be the greatest artist of the ukiyo-e school, he is said to have made over 30,000 designs (prints, drawings, and paintings) on subjects or in formats as diverse as landscapes; beautiful women; kabuki actor portraits; legendary figures and historical tales; still life; nature, including birds and flowers; erotica; surimono; sketch books; illustrated albums, books, poetry compilations and novels; and didactic painting manuals.
Hokusai had already published his own prototype of the wave in 1800-1805 for a horizontal chban (185 x 245 mm) titled in kana script Oshiokuri hat tssen no zu ("Express delivery boats rowing through waves": おしおくりはとうつうせんのず) and signed "Hokusai egaku" (ほくさゐゑかく) in a horizontal style mimicking European writing. Indeed, the vessels in the Kanagawa design are also express delivery boats rushing the early morning catch of fish to market. In the image above left, we see a huge wave similar to the Kanagawa version, as well as express boats navigating in the troughs.
One other point of clarification can be made here. Some commentators have described the Great Wave as a "tidal wave," but that has been declared inaccurate. Rather, it is a "rogue wave" generated by high winds and strong currents. In this particular instance, scientists would describe it as the result of linear effects of directional focusing, arising when "wave trains" with different directions and phases interfere with each other at a particular point (see Dudley ref.).
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