Hokusai: The Mad Painter

There is a big difference between doing what you want and what you must. In the year 1760 on the isolated island nation of Japan, a 26 year old Katsushika Hokusai was broke and desperate and struggling, and he was an artist. As a matter of fact, what other kind of artist is there? This is before he was world famous. Before he painted the Great Wave Off Kanagawa. Before he was imitated by artists like Vincent van Gogh. Before his artistic genius was ever noticed, he was a street peddler, a hustler, selling everything from spices to almanacs.

Just a man trying to support his family. Sometimes we do what we must. Welcome to The Humanity Archive, where we fuse the historical and the philosophical. Exploring the past. Informing the present. Digging through humanities archives for examples of our greatest achievements, our biggest failures, all to help us today.

I'm Jermaine Fowler. Let's get into it. Katsushika Hokusai. Probably not one of the most famous people to ever live, but someone who speaks to me probably because of his famous painting. It is called the Great Wave Off Kanagawa. We'll just call it the Great Wave as it's also commonly known. This was painted by him around 1830 and this painting reminds me that everything is a matter of perspective. You see, in the painting there are these men and they're in these boats and this wave is towering up over them.

It looks like it's about to just crash down and crush them, destroy them, and take them away from everything they've ever known. Kinda looks like claws about to just snap them up, but then you see ever so faintly in the background is Mount Fuji, which is normally the biggest, the tallest, the grandest thing in any frame. 12,300 and some odd feet mountain. Usually this is the end-all, be-all. It is the focal point. But to these boaters the wave was Mount Fuji. Fuji is a volcano, but the wave was an active, destructive, watery volcano about to crash down on them.

And so again, it reminds me that everything is a matter of perspective. That's why I love that painting. And that's why it's one of my favorite paintings. So it made me decide to look a little bit more into the life of the man who painted it. Katsushika Hokusai born in 1760 in Edo, which is now known as Tokyo. He died in the same place in Edo, or Tokyo, in 1849. And he'll be forever known as this master artist and printmaker of the Yukio style. Yukio, meaning pictures of the floating world. So going back to 1760, again Hokusai, as a young man, 26, and he has the pressing responsibility of supporting a family.

And what's he going to do? His dreams actually nearly died at the cruel hands of necessity. You have babies to feed. You have a wife to take care of and run a household with. I'm sure many of you can relate to the sacrifices that you have to make in a situation such as this. Your dreams might fade away at what you have to do. And not to say there isn't any joy in raising a family, however, we all have dreams and things that we want to attain, but we have to make a noble choice to give those up. So when he wasn't selling in the market, he was still trying to sneak in and steal away moments to paint and to illustrate and to fulfill his dream of being this painter.

So he used every free second to keep his dream alive. He worked and he pursued and he transformed into this brilliant painter over time because he didn't give up. As I look at his life and his life's work, I see this as a man who emptied his soul on canvas. He created works that were gripping. They were rousing and beautifully structured and they exploded with this energy and this volume. I always see the artist as the vanguards of freedom because in this very, very strict social structure, this class structure in Japan at the time, what other outlet is there to express yourself then through the arts?

And you can almost look at the class structure as a rock, right? And the arts as water. And if you know anything about water, you know that water will find a way, travel and find cracks and crevices. So the human spirit is just like that. I think the human spirit being like water, it is going to find a way to express itself no matter what. No matter what obstacle. No matter what thing that tries to impede it. So we have to assume if Hokusai was a man of many words, he didn't write very many of them down. Because we don't have much on record from him.

Not very many quotes. No journals. Not even very many quotes about him from other people of the time period. But there is a couple. I'm going to read one to you. Give you a little bit of insight about the man and who he was. He says, "From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was 50, I had published an infinity of designs, but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, 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 86. So that by 90 I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At 100, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them while at 130, 40 or more, I will have reached the stage where every dot, every stroke I paint will be alive. May heaven that grants long life give you the chance to prove that this is no lie." Wow! That's why I think the running theme of all of this is patience and hard work.

Pursuit of happiness. Pursuit of perfection. Even though we may never reach it. But Hokusai, he is saying I'm going to keep going. I'm going to keep trying. I'm going to keep pursuing, endeavoring, putting forth effort to become better and better and better to the point that my painting is heavenly. That it's otherworldly. That it's existential, spiritual, put my whole soul, being, self into my artwork. That is what this is saying to me. That's how this quote speaks to me. We see the result, right? I mean, world renowned artists are transcending time.

Transcending space. Spirit of artistic perfection ends up paying off for him because low and behold he gets a well-paid commission. I think it was to paint a flag. Somebody saw his artwork. They liked it enough to say, hey, I'm going to pay you for this. I would like to pay you to paint this flag. Maybe not what he wanted to paint, but hey, he's getting paid now. So he's able to bring some support into his family, through his love, through his passion, through his artwork. After years, he's finally earning from it. To earn a living as an artist in feudal Japan was damned hard. If you have a family it's even harder.

So we fast forward into the spring of 1804 and he's, again, rewarded in an unexpected way. He's at this festival in Tokyo and he walks into the midst of a large crowd. I'm not sure where exactly he gets this idea, but he unrolls a 20 yard piece of parchment paper. Then he gathers buckets of water and ink and mops and brooms, and he's ready for a spectacle. He grabs the mop and then he dips it into the pigment and he pushes colors this way and that way. And he alternates the mop and the broom and he sloshes and splashes and spills and spatters and splatters paint onto this huge roll of paper.

The small crowd grows larger and larger. You can imagine their curiosity is giving way to amazement. Things starting to take shape and take form. And then the painting was finished. Difficult to make out at the ground level, onlookers, they rushed to the temple roofs and they looked down from this higher position and before them lay a crystal clear picture of Japan's beloved Buddhist saint, Daruma. With a showman's flair Hokusai had painted a figure that he knew would resonate emotionally with the audience. So for this, he became a local hero.

So he started to achieve some recognition for his work and the things that he's doing, this showmanship. And to me, this seems like something I think is very innovative for the time that it was in. So not stopping there, he continues and he's creating these colossal creations, like the one that I just described, and he's also doing these microscopic masterpieces. We're told that he gets a grain of rice and he's making these very fine detailed drawings on small grains of rice to the amazement of everyone.

So when I think about all this showmanship and these displays, what he is doing, it really takes me back to the why. How and why was he doing this? And I recall again, at the beginning of the story, we did say that he was a vendor, street hustler. And if it's anything like today to be a street hustler, you have to be scrappy. It's one of the most difficult professions to etch any type of living out of. It's like the small-scale entrepreneur, that scrappy hustle, you know, you got to go out on street corners and try to hock and sell and, and push out your work. And he was selling these things that he didn't want to sell.

Now he's kind of taking that same mentality of entrepreneurship and applying it to his art. So I think that was pretty cool. How he was able to do that and take that and make that connection to his artwork to become more well-known throughout Japan and then eventually elsewhere throughout the world. So with all this, his name caught the attention of the Shogun Tokugawa Ienari, and then he's invited to an art competition. And the only thing that I can think of in modern day that we could associate to this would be like if you were an artist and you got invited to the governor's mansion to show your work to be presented in front of a crowd.

So this was definitely something that was big. A great honor for him. Here's the kicker though. He's pitted against this very renowned painter named Buncho and each man was instructed to come up with a painting on the spot. So no time to really think about it or anything. So the master artist, Buncho, created a phenomenal painting. So impressive it seems unbeatable and then goes Hokusai. And we're told that he started by sketching beautiful birds and landscape scenes almost as if he's warming up. Then he tears down a large screen of paper. I've seen this before.

This time he starts painting it with a broom. Very familiar, right? And he does these hues of light blues and dark blues and a picture of a river starts to take form. And then in a crazily inventive move he reaches into a cage and grabs a rooster. What is he going to do with this? Well he dips its talens into reddish orange paint and then releases it onto the paper. And the rooster walks around and its footprints create this random pattern. Next thing you know it's recognizable as fall maple leaves. What is the significance of this? Well the people perk up because this painting looks oddly familiar. Most of the crowd had visited the Tatsuta River in the fall because of its natural beauty.

Leaves fall into it and they admired this. These orange leaves floating downstream. And since Hokusai was a master at connecting his art to the very memory and soul of the crowd. He'd recreated this Tatsuta River in an amazing and innovative and just crazy inventive way. His name is firmly cemented as the people's champion. Artists are the vanguards of the human spirit, the human memory, the human soul, if you will. And we see again this hard work. This is the theme that I'm going to continue to tie into this narrative and this short biography of Hokusai because he was a man utterly absorbed with art and drawing.

So when a bill collector came to collect, he wouldn't even look up from his work. He would just put his hand out and just hand them an envelope. Sometimes they were short changed. They came back angry and then other times they got more than what they bargained for. And I'm sure they didn't come back in that case but money wasn't a factor for him. It wasn't about the money. It wasn't about the superficial. It was about legacy. It was about a commitment to personal honor in work, integrity, ceaseless, never ending drawing. Again he had this very fiery, unquenchable commitment to his artwork. I think there's definitely something to be said about the tremendous value of consistent hard work.

Hokusai is a very good example of this. It's interesting that he produced so many drawings. He produced so many paintings. It defies calculation. I was actually floored by the amount of ideas that he was just able to place on canvas. He completed no less than 40,000 paintings, drawings, sketches. He's like a machine basically producing daily. So no subject escaped his drawing table. He did political scenes, nature, the marketplace, religion, wealth, poverty, everyday life. The freedom and the artistic expression cannot be understated so that even some of the wild fantasies and the musings and the depths of the human psyche come out on paper.

Whether it'd be the normal, the erotic, the taboo, the mundane, the extravagant, the extraordinary. All of this comes out on paper. And it makes me wonder if there is a correlation between the strictness of the society and the sheer magnitude and freedom of the artwork. Maybe the stricter the society, the more free the art. And he didn't stop there. He drew nature in the form of animals, birds, insects, fish, mountains, grasses, and landscapes. He did lightning and thunder, wind and fire. None of it escaped his pen. His sketchbook showed people of all professions, all activities.

From weavers to wrestlers and archers and soldiers. He did mythical heroes. He did the ghastly ghosts, prostitutes, beggars, samurai. Nothing was too high. Nothing was too low. He literally painted everything. And I think that's part of his charm because he was able to capture the human condition and all of its forms and all of its beauty. And he also was able to capture the natural world that we all live in. We are talking about legacy and we are talking about greatness, genius. Those are the more subversive terms that really cut a whole lot more deeply than just success that in modern times is tied to the monetary, let's be honest.

Tied a lot of times to money, to possessions. Not tied to the intangible, to the things that cut really deeply into the human spirit. One of the other themes in Hokusai's life would be the pursuit of happiness because this happiness, and I mean this very deep sense of happiness in what you're doing and this state of being that you can accomplish. That is almost like a nirvana, I would say, or like a heaven on earth experience by doing something that you so much love that it's like you're in a momentary heaven. How many of us are able to get this and attain this in what we do every day?

And I found another quote, it's not from Hokusai, it's from Asai Ryoi. And this is from Tails of the Floating World. And it ties into this pursuit of happiness and living for the moment. It says, "living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself, and simply floating unconcerned by the prospect of eminent poverty, buoyant, and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river."

So that really touched me because it's saying that you can attain happiness as a personal freedom, no matter how strict the society is, or no matter the poverty or the suffering, if only for a moment we can attain freedom. There's definitely something to say about attaining freedom in the larger world around you and ending suffering in that way. But it definitely offers a great hope that you can attain this freedom through art, through music, through the humanities and these things that a lot of times people are saying kind of need to go out the window for the sciences and technology and things that are more rational.

This floating world mentality is what uplifted the artwork that Hokusai was doing. This world away from the world, right? This world away from the strict bureaucracy and the strict social order and hierarchy and classism and poverty that are very evident in a lot of the circles of Japanese society. Again, back to happiness though. I think that we tend to think about happiness and we focus on things in life. We often crave or long to own things, concrete consumables, like money or intangible resources, such as time or even inner peace.

Like we want something to hold on to. And I think that happiness is again, tied to personal freedom. The type of freedom that allows us to control our own destiny. The type of freedom that transcends economics, judgment, or status. And Hokusai was able to achieve happiness through his artistic expression. He lived through trauma, through civil war, through rapid social change, restricting laws and the full scope of human tribulations. Things that we all go through. Things that you go through and I go through. Loss and poverty. I mean, he always didn't make the amount of money or manage his money correctly to where he always had everything he needed, but he was still paying and that was free for him.

He lost everything when his house was burned down, his life's work, but that didn't even stop him there. So he still pursued this happiness, this artwork that gave that to him. It wasn't so much about the product, but as the journey. The heaven that he was able to create for himself on earth, this nirvana, this flow. So Hokusai, he lived to the ripe old age of 90 years old. And one of his other few surviving quotes tells us much about his character once again, and how he was on a humble quest for perfection. He says, "if only heaven will give me just another 10 years, just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."

So here's a person who, by all intents and purposes the world over, is known as a real painter. One of the realist painters that ever lived. But yet he is saying just a little bit longer and I can get it. I don't have it yet. The humility in that statement, that's something to aspire to. The life of Hokusai, a pursuit of happiness, hard work, freedom through the arts. That is what I got out of his biography. And I was really excited to share this story with you.