Two of Hokusai's Bridge Prints

#hokusai #ukiyo-e #japaneseprints

Hokusai is well known for his series of views of Mt Fuji and he also created print series on topics like famous Bridges.

Note how he makes use of traditional S curve compositions in the context of a print rather than a scroll or screen painting.

Yet Hokusai could also create compositions full of angles like this one!
Notice how the verticals of the reeds the tree and pillar complement the bridge supports and counter balance the curved areas and the circular forms of the hats and umbrellas!

Truly a masterpiece!

More Hokusai Paintings

#HOKUSAI is one of the most unique geniuses of Japanese and World art.

Painter and designer  his images were used on just about everything!

Packaging lanterns toys fans popular prints art prints scroll painting screen paintings art instructional manuals ... frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a kimono turns up with Hokusai art on it. This a festival banner with an image of #Shoki #Zhongkui the demon queller.

I'm sure the only reason there are no handpainted Hokusai collaborations with potters is that most of the major potteries for polychrome and enamel wares were down further south!

This is a silk scroll painted by Hokusai. The subject also used by other print makers and painters is or rather refers to the famous Tang Chinese poet Li Bai or Po looking at a waterfall. I say refers because his costume seems an odd hybrid of Chinese and Japanese and Hokusai has focused our attention as much on the waterfall as the poet.

Finally a painting that is thought to be a collaboration of Hokusai with his daughter OI also a painter partly because the flowers are rendered in a slightly brush style and partly because OI was known to have painted chrysantheums and other flowers. 

This is suppose to be a lion by the way. Unfortunately while Japanese artists may have occasionally had access to tiger skins their ideas of what actual lions and tigers looked like allowed room for imagination!

Wikipedia Commons and various museum sites has excellent Hokusai selections so you can download images that are far closer to the original size if you have  a large monitor and view more detail than a simple blog post allows.

I hope this rather simple limited introduction tempts you to learn more about Hokusai.

A HOKUSAI MEDLEY

#Hokusai is well known for his landscape prints and his famous #Manga sketchbooks but he was also a painter and designer of surimono prints. 

#surimono #japaneseprints #ukiyo-e #phoenix

I've shared 2 of his lesser known surimono prints and in the middle is part of a screen painting of a phoenix for contrast.

I have used this one a few times before as as well as being a well designed print it shows traditional asian brushes,an inkstone, and a block of ink. 

This is a detail of a 8 fold screen set of paintings probably used in a bedroom.

Japaneses prints had a variety of formats.

Surimono often feature long horizontal formats as they were frequently folded into pamphlets and given as newyear gifts.

More Hokusai soon! 

I'll try to find some unusual images that illustrate all aspects of his work.

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Summer in Sydney

Todays weather forecast for Sydney should be using this for an icon?

Empress Wu 3 Images

#EmpressWu #Wuzetian

Its curious that no images of Wu Zetian survive?

Okay there's that theory about certain Buddhist statuary but ...

so what I've done in this post is collect some modern images that are based on what we know of TANG IMPERIAL costume and  are most likely to reflect outfits she could have actually worn and not just be an artist's fancy of a sexy young WU in silk lingerie of which I had to scroll past far too many to find what I considered to be the 3 best images.

ENJOY

Pictographs and Words as Pictures and Phoenixes

#Pictographs and Words as Pictures and #Phoenixes

This imperfect image comes after some editing from a textbook of chinese characters showing six types of Chinese Script

yes I know I missed a few spots and probably deleted too much and the eraser tool on one character  ...

for some reason the scripts are aligned oddly two forms of seal script then li shu then xing then regular then full cao frankly if I had been doing the layout I would have shown kai modern simplified then cao and xing then on the right li and the two archaic forms.

However imperfect as the image and my editing was (its an old file form when I'd had less practice with a eraser tool) it does give some idea of the progression from pictograph to ideogram over the centuries.

So is the "word" a picture even in a modern form?

An Asian or other scholar educated in calligraphy and radicals would see a tail and head under the vault of heaven in all the forms and a calligrapher might state the cursive form is both a picture and a word representing the phoenix in flight

I suspect someone being exposed to chinese scripts for the first time if asked which they think is a phoenix would pick the second character from the right ?

Which would you?