The Great Wave

We just started a new project this week. We are going to do watercolors of The Great Wave.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

by Hokusai

1829-1832

History:

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is woodblock print by Japanese artist Hokusai, published sometime between 1830 and 1833 in the late Edo period as the first print in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is Hokusai's most famous work, and one of the best recognized works of Japanese art in the world. It depicts an enormous wave threatening boats off the coast of the prefecture of Kanagawa. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is, as the picture's title notes, more likely to be a large rogue wave. As in all the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.

Hokusai was born in 1760, in Katsushika,a district in the east of Edo (now Tokyo) . His birth name was Tokitarō, and he was the son of a mirror maker to the shōgun.

He started painting when he was six years old and at twelve his father sent him to work at a booksellers. At sixteen, he was apprenticed as an engraver and spent three years learning the trade. At the same time he began to produce his own illustrations. At eighteen he was accepted as an apprentice to the artist Katsukawa Shunshō, one of the foremost ukiyo-e artists of the time. After a year, his master gave him the name Shunrō, the name he used to sign his first works in 1779.

Shunshō died in 1793, so by himself Hokusai began to study distinct Japanese and Chinese styles and some Dutch and French painting.

Look at Reference Questions:

Why do you see in this painting?

Do you see Mount Fuji?

What kind of lines do you see?

How does this painting make you feel?

This painting is a woodblock print. Do you know what that is?