Hokusai Quotes

From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.

If heaven had granted me five more years, I could have become a real painter.

You'll see: if you acquire a taste for drawing, you won't be able to do without it, just like me. Hokusai (The Old Man Mad About Drawing)

Look at how beautiful this ink is. Now do you understand why I needed clear water? Water is the brightness of the day and the whiteness of the paper. Black is the velvet of night and the satiny ink of the paintbrush. If you know how to make ink correctly, you will never again be afraid of nightmares." Hokusai (The Old Man Mad About Drawing)

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature–birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life. - from Hokusai’s ‘The Art Crazy Old Man

A good artist should laugh often!

We derive the greatest pleasure and fulfillment when all our faculties are drawn together into our life’s work. In this state of absorption, we experience extraordinary satisfaction. We human beings are attracted to the experience of intense involvement. The outcome of this involvement, says Hokusai, is sublime. “By ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.” Hokusai’s lesson, finally, is that a life of passion for dharma is a fulfilled

Hokusai managed to integrate this into a Japanese vision of landscapes and nature prints which strike the Western viewer as utterly Japanese, and the Japanese as totally Western, even today.

As he spoke these words, a giant wave, just like the one in Katsushika Hokusai’s, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” rippled in below the lofty ledge. Chaiya saw a thousand images in a second. “Brothers!” he shouted. “Brothers! Brothers! Brothers!…” His voice echoed and vibrated through their hearts. They were all wide awake. “The presence in the cave will swallow us up,” Chaiya thought.

I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred and ten, everything--every dot, every dash--will live

Los pintores japoneses de ukiyo-e que más influyeron en los impresionistas fueron Hiroshige y otro igual de importante y famoso llamado Hokusai, cuyo rastro podía seguirse en todos los impresionistas y postimpresionistas, especialmente en Vincent Van Gogh, que directamente los copiaba.

how to focus—how to, as we might say these days, “bring it.” Like Hokusai, their lives begin to look like guided missiles. How exactly do they accomplish this? How do you get from where most of us live—the run-of-the-mill split mind—to the gathered mind of a Hokusai? Krishna articulates the principle succinctly: Acting in unity with your purpose itself creates unification. Actions that consciously support dharma have the power to begin to gather our energy. These outward actions, step-by-step, shape us inwardly. Find your dharma and do it. And in the process of doing it, energy begins to gather itself into a laser beam of effectiveness. Krishna quickly adds: Do not worry about the outcome. Success or failure are not your concern. It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of another. Your task is only to bring as much life force as you can muster to the execution of your dharma. In this spirit, Chinese Master Guan Yin Tzu wrote: “Don’t waste time calculating your chances of success and failure. Just fix your aim and begin.

they found themselves drawn to Japanese references over and over: the deceptively innocent paintings of Yoshitomo Nara; Miyazaki anime like Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke; other, more adult anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, both of which Sam had loved; and of course, Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, the first of which is The Great Wave.

I sat down on the bench in front of the print and made some notes. “Katsushika Hokusai. 1760–1849. Japanese printmaker. Leading Japanese expert on Chinese painting. Master of the Ukiyo-e form. Nichiren Buddhist.” Later, at home, I Googled Hokusai. He died at eighty-nine, and sure enough, on his deathbed—still looking to penetrate deeper into his art—he had exclaimed, “If only heaven will give me just another ten years!… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.” Hokusai was a man who saw his work as a means to “penetrate to the essential nature” of things. And he appears to have succeeded. His work, a hundred and fifty years after his death, could reach right off a gallery wall and grab me in the gut. More than anything, I was intrigued by the quality of Hokusai’s passion for his work. He helped me see that a life devoted to dharma can be a deeply ardent life.

Watanabe-san and Sadie exchanged gifts. She brought him a pair of carved wooden Ichigo chopsticks that their Japanese distributor had had made to celebrate the release of the second Ichigo in Japan. In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process---its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman's slate appears to be blank. "I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you," Watanabe-san said. "This is by Hokusai's daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survived, but I think she is even better than the father.

In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.

It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did. Consider Mazer in a 2017 interview with Kotaku, celebrating the twentieth-anniversary Nintendo Switch port of the original Ichigo: kotaku: It is said that the original Ichigo is one of the most graphically beautiful low-budget games ever made, but its critics also accuse it of appropriation. How do you respond to that? mazer: I do not respond to that. kotaku: Okay…But would you make the same game if you were making it now? mazer: No, because I am a different person than I was then. kotaku: In terms of its obvious Japanese references, I mean. Ichigo looks like a character Yoshitomo Nara could have painted. The world design looks like Hokusai, except for the Undead level, which looks like Murakami. The soundtrack sounds like Toshiro Mayuzumi… mazer: I won’t apologize for the game Sadie and I made. [Long pause.] We had many references—Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, Philip Glass, Chuck Close, Escher. [Another long pause.] And what is the alternative to appropriation? kotaku: I don’t know. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures. kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn’t be a problem for you, I guess?

Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai;

If only the gods would give me ten or at least five years more, I could become a perfect artist.

At the age of six, I was seized by the mania of drawing the shape of objects. By the age of fifty, I had published an infinite number of drawings, but everything produced before the age of seventy is not worthy of consideration. It was at the age of sixty-three that I gradually began to understand the structure of true nature, of animals, trees, birds and insects. As a result, by the age of eighty, I will penetrate into the mystery of things; at one hundred I will have attained a degree of wonder and by the time I am one hundred and ten, whether I create a point or a line, everything will be alive. I ask those who live as long as I do to see if I keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five by me, Hokusai, the old man mad about painting.

We’d emerged in one of the main cataphile haunts, a cavernous chamber with sand-packed floors and high ceilings supported by thick limestone columns. Every surface—every inch of the wall, of the pillars, and much of the rocky ceiling—was covered in paintings. In the darkness, the paintings were subdued and shadowy, but under the beam of a flashlight, they blazed. The centerpiece was a replica of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, with the curling wave of frothy blues and whites. Spread throughout the room were stone-cut tables, rough-hewn benches and chairs. At the center of the chamber was a giant sculpture of a man with arms raised to the ceiling, like a subterranean Atlas, holding up the city. “This is like—” Benoit paused, apparently searching for a recognizable analogy “—the Times Square of the catacombs.” On weekend nights, he explained, La Plage and certain other voluminous chambers in the catacombs filled with revelers.

fucking tsunami of cops like fucking Hokusai got a career in law enforcement.

Uno de los componentes del elixir de Dippel fue lo que acabo produciendo el azul que adornaría no solo el cielo de la noche estrellada de Van Gogh y las aguas de la gran ola de Kanagawa de Hokusai, sino también los uniformes de la infantería del ejercito prusiano, como si algo en la estructura química del color que invocara la violencia, una sombra...

[Hokusai’s] most famous works — color woodblock landscape prints issued in series, beginning with Thirty-Six views of Mount Fuji — were produced within a relatively short time, in an amazing burst of creative energy that lasted from about 1830 to 1836, when he was already in his seventies.

Qui se ressemble s'assemble, mais parvient-on pour autant à se comprendre?

Sangre de Cristo foothills rising up to Santa Fe Baldy, a great gray-topped mound of a mountain, its summit often graced by snow. As described in the interview, this peak helped inspire his novella “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.

If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Chaim Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an Annunciation by Franciabigio, the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, the words of a sermon by John Donne.

Japanese arts, crafts and culture became a craze after the 1860s. In particular woodblock prints and paintings featuring cherry blossoms, by artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige,

From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shape of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of drawings. But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy three I have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I will have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I will be a marvellous artist. At one hundred and ten, everything I create - a dot, a line - will come alive. I call on those who still may be alive to see if I keep my word. Signed: The Old Man Mad About Art.

Echoing Nöin’s words, he wrote: ‘The spring mist filled the sky and, in spite of myself, the gods filled my heart with a yearning to cross the Shirakawa barrier.’ There were no surly border guards and no crowds of travellers when I finally reached the barrier — no merchants in sedan chairs, no daimyo on horseback with retinues of foot soldiers and servants and porters; no pilgrims, no priests; no ladies in palanquins or travellers in capes and straw hats, like the colourful figures in Hokusai’s woodblock prints. In fact, I nearly walked straight past it along the rough country road.

From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shape of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of drawings. But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy three I have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I will have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I will be a marvellous artist. At one hundred and ten, everything I create - a dot, a line - will come alive. I call on those who still may be alive to see if I keep my word.

la edad de seis años tuve la manía de dibujar la forma de los objetos. A los cincuenta años había publicado infinidad de dibujos, pero todo lo que produje antes de los setenta no vale nada. A los setenta y tres aprendí un poco acerca de la verdadera estructura de la naturaleza. Cuando tenga ochenta habré progresado aun más, a los noventa penetraré en el misterio de las cosas y, cuando tenga ciento diez, todo lo que haga, ya sea un punto o una línea, estará vivo. Escrito a la edad de setenta y cinco años por Hokusai, el anciano loco por dibujar».

Uno dei componenti dell’elisir di Dippel avrebbe poi prodotto il blu che compare nella Notte stellata di van Gogh e nelle acque della Grande onda di Kanagawa di Hokusai, ma anche nell’uniforme della fanteria dell’esercito prussiano, come se la struttura chimica del colore portasse in eredità la violenza, l’ombra, la macchia originaria degli esperimenti dell’alchimista che faceva a pezzi animali vivi, assemblava i loro resti in orribili chimere e tentava di rianimarli con scariche elettriche. Mostri che ispirarono a Mary Shelley il suo capolavoro, Frankenstein, o il moderno Prometeo, in cui mise in guardia contro il progresso cieco della scienza, la più pericolosa di tutte le arti umane.