Cathy's Art Diary

Wonderful exhibition at the British Museum of recently discovered drawings but Hokusai for a encyclopaedia. Drawings by Hokusai are very rare as they were done as a tool in the process of making woodblocks for printing. They would be stuck to the block and used as a guide for cutting the lines and hence destroyed. These drawings ever used and have therefor survived. There were 163 postcard sized drawings arranged in groups on different subjects. Because the works were so slow it did take a while to go round and this wasn’t helped by the middle aged, including me, having a glasses crisis at the start as they worked out which pair would work best. My favourite pictures were scenes of everyday life albeit often overseen by a god. There were also fantasy works which verged on manga. The detail was amazing, as in this picture of a peacock, and some had tiny cross hatching to show rough fabrics. Some of the compositions were complex such as a god revealing the appearance of a spirt in...

Lovely exhibition at the British Museum looking at the life and work of the Japanese print maker, Hokusai, just one of the names he used during his career. The star of the show was obviously “The Great Wave” but it put this famous and much mimicked picture into the context of the rest of this work. The picture was published in 1831 when he was in his early 70s. He trained as a woodblock maker in his teens and in his 40s and 50s became well known as an illustrator for fiction, working on a series of popular books called Strange Tales and there were lovely examples of this work. The wave itself was one of a series 36 views of Mount Fuji using European deep perspective. In Eastern art perspective was shown by distant objects being placed high up in the frame but in a series of prints he did for the British East India Company he started to experiment with Western artists ideas using a low vanishing point and light and shade to give depth. I was also fascinated to see he i...