context: painting > prints > artists > hokusai

Dragon On Smoke Escaping Mount Fuji

Hokusai: Two Contests

I've read both of these stories in more than one version from more than one source. That doesn't make them true, but I'd like them to be, so I'll spread them some more. A key point is that Hokusai was a painter as well as a print artist (giving me an excuse to include a painting, even though it has nothing to do with these tales) - and that he was an extraordinary enough figure to inspire and support stories like these.

At one painting contest the given theme was 'autumn leaves in water'. Hokusai unrolled a long handscroll, then dipped a brush in blue paint, and walked the length of it five times, creating five long wavy lines. He then got some russet paint, and a chicken. He dipped the chicken's feet in the paint, and pushed and chased it around the paper, so that its feet created the leaves. (This is around 160 years before Yves Klein followed his example with naked women and, of course, blue paint.)

Another contest demanded portraits. Hokusai wandered around the town square with his walking stick, looking in on others' work, and everyone wondered why he wasn't taking part, until at the end he insisted the judges climbed the town's fire watch tower - whereupon they saw his huge portrait of a town official, over 50 yards square, scratched into the ground with his stick. (It's said that he painted a number of giant images of Daruma, the monk who introduced Zen to SE Asia - the largest dimensions I've seen quoted were 200m square!)

sideways: modernism & postmodernism