Katsushika Hokusai
The old man mad about drawing
Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese painter and printmaker whose work, above all The Great Wave, has become one of the most recognised images in the world.
Born in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, in 1760, Hokusai trained as a woodblock carver and then in the studio of the print designer Katsukawa Shunshō. Over a working life of some seventy years he produced tens of thousands of paintings, prints and drawings, and changed his artistic name more than thirty times, signing his late works Gakyō Rōjin, “the old man mad about drawing.”
His Hokusai Manga, sketchbooks of people, animals, plants and spirits, filled fifteen volumes. His series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, begun around 1830, set the sacred mountain behind scenes of ordinary life, and its Great Wave, with Fuji small beneath a towering sea, was soon admired far beyond Japan, influencing European painters from Monet to Van Gogh.
In the postscript to his One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, written at seventy-three, Hokusai said that nothing he had made before seventy was worthy of notice, and hoped that by a hundred and ten every dot and every line he drew would be alive. He died in 1849, still hoping for more time to learn.
The Order honours Hokusai for a life given wholly to making, and for the hope in that late postscript. His wish that every dot and line he drew might one day be alive is the Second Breath in a single sentence: the maker longing to give life to what he makes; see The First and Second Breath and Works That Come Alive.