Blog Post 4 The Lonely artist Podcast ep:42 The Great Wave by Andy Menzel

 

Blog Post #4

By Andy Menzel

My fourth blog post will talk about episode 42 of the Lonely Pallet podcast. Titled “Katsushika Hokusai’s the Great Wave off Kanagawa”. This is a piece that many people have seen before, and even if you don’t know the particular name of the piece, you will definitely know it if you see it. A massive wave comes and is ready to engulf a small boat. It’s a scene that hopefully none of us ever experience in real life. The blue of the wave definitely catches one’s attention as well, combined with the bright churning white of the foam. This dichotomy of blue against white gives us a feeling of the raw power of such a disaster and really shows natures wrath on display. Towards the back, the viewers can vaguely make out a mountain as it blends in with the surrounding wave. Like all episodes of the podcast (and one of my personal reasons I like it so much) the narrator starts by asking random people their thoughts on the art in question. This really gives us a she viewer and listener a nice idea to understand other people’s perspectives on the art in question. This podcast made me think of a time in my life when I went and swam int eh ocean, the feeling of the ocean as it pushed me up gently and then down and then again. I’ll never forget that feeling, I remember even going back to my hotel room that night and I could feel the rising and falling as I had when I was on the water floating. This fascination and feeling of the oceans have been a central part of humanities identity, the oceans have given us great amounts of food, provided routes for travel and given great enjoyment for as long as humanity has existed. Yet the oceans can also cause great devastation and a huge loss of life. The ocean is of course indifferent to us, our woeful pleas and of course it is, it’s not like it’s a conscious thinking being with an agenda or something. Like the Mona Lisa before it, this print is extremely recognizable, hell it even has an emoji made of it. Unfortunately, we stop to see this piece for what it truly is especially in relation to Japan and its history with the ocean itself.

 

Japan and the ocean are so intertwined together you can’t talk about one without the other. Japan and the fishing industry go together like peanut butter and jelly. Fishing is what Japan became known for, and what gave the country so much value not only to its people but also to other countries looking to trade and get in on the profits. Much of the city of Edo Japan (now modern-day Tokyo) would go on to be affected by the oceans as well as the teachings of Buddhism, the dominate religion at the time. Instead of looking at the world through a nihilistic lens, the citizens of Edo chose to live it up, with all the pleasure they could get out of the short life they lived. Popular entertainment became a big thing and art became a big commodity, especially wood block prints. These prints often depicted various images of Japan and were extremely cheap to buy and easy to mass produce.

Wood block printing evolved over time, with artists adding extra blocks for depth and more colors. Hokusai became an expert at this type of printing, producing images of Japan that tourists would have bought as souvenirs. Visages like mount Fuji, the tallest volcano in Japan standing tall and imposing in many of his prints. It’s interesting to note that “The Great Wave” was not Hokusai’s first attempt at making a giant wave print but another attempt. This print improves upon the first in a number of ways, some of which were brought over by western art such as a lower horizon line and a receded background. This helps to show the sheer wave as well as its power. Another thing brought over from western art was the introduction of Prussian blue. This synthetic pigment would go on to become a staple in Japanese art prints and really helps to define this print, as stated earlier in the post. Eventually one of Hokusai’s sketchbooks made its way to America where artists ate it up, incorporating various parts of his art style into their own work. At this time, we see a Japanese culture craze, with various artists using and taking great inspiration from Japanese prints such as Vincent Van Goh. However, many people simply see this as really just cultural appropriation rather than a genuine interest. At the end of the day there’s just a simple reason to why this piece is so popular with viewers, and that the wave resonates with so much power, and it's simply a metaphor. The raw power of the wave and the fact that those poor fishermen are doomed. Even though they are trapped in time at that moment.