Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything

During the break I went to see the British Museum exhibition, 'Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything'.  For anyone with an interest in drawing the exhibition is revelatory. These are drawings made to be used as templates for woodblocks and would normally be lost as the block cutters would use the drawings as guides for their cutting, cutting the whites away as they copied the images. But for some reason this series of 103 images were never made into prints, so we have a chance to see Hokusai in the raw and what an experience that is! 

A bolt of lightning strikes Virūdhaka dead

Images from 'Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything'.  

The first thing that strikes you is the range of images. From genre scenes of everyday life, via wild life illustrations and mythic stories, to how paper is made. Every subject is handled with a total command of graphic invention, his small brush thickening and thinning its way through the making of lines and the creation of various surface textures. His linear elements are sprung in such a way that his figures have a coiled life, an inner energy that makes everything seem alive. There is action, such as the bolt of lightning that strikes Virūdhaka dead, which could be taken straight out of a present day manga comic, visual poetry as when the moon is reached by climbing up into the night sky using the clouds as a ladder and the everyday of two cats meeting and arching their backs in defiance. In 'how its done' images such as the one above illustrating the stages of paper-making, what could be a boring piece of factual description, is enlivened by inventive body movements and shapes taken up by the workers, workers who are totally embedded into their work environment and as much part of the process as the water and the shredded plants. 

I was lucky as it was a quiet day, so I was able to spend over an hour simply gazing in wonder at these amazing images. 

Images from 'Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything'.  

The exhibition is on until the 30th of January 2022, so if you are in London and were thinking of visiting the British Museum, do go and feast your eyes on drawing after drawing that together demonstrate how inventive a visual mind can be and how skilful hand control can become and how above all the problem, 'I cant think what to draw' can be solved by deciding to draw anything and everything that is seen with your eyes and imagined in your head.

See also:

Drawing in Japan

Drawing in Japan part two

Drawing water

Drawing animals

Chinese ink drawing

Emakimono and other narrative images

Detail from a Chōjū-giga scroll, illustrating a fable

Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, is a famous set of four picture scrolls, belonging to the Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto. In English these would be called 'Scrolls of Frolicking Animals and Humans', they were depictions of animal fables, alongside some pretty odd bits of human behaviour. I was particularly drawn to them, because they reminded me of Peter Bruegel's work. 

Chōjū-giga scroll: A head tug of war 

Peter Bruegel'

By exploring non western art forms and looking at how the images can relate to or indeed revitalise the Western European image bank, we can develop possibilities based on hybrid forms. As Homi K. Bhabha reminds us in 'The Location of Culture', the interface between cultures is a most rewarding place to be. These complex visual narratives question our assumptions as to how to depict time in a static medium. It's a long standing problem and I have referred to it several times before in this blog, and each time I do it's as if another piece of the jig-saw puzzle can be inserted. So what is it about picture scrolls that adds to the way we can think about time in a drawing? 

Emakimono, or picture scrolls are Japanese handscrolls that have been made for the past 1,000 years, the first ones being roughly contemporary with the Bayeux tapestry. 

 

Emakimono scroll: Japan: mid-Edo: Cockfighting

Emakimono scrolls can combine both text and image and they are designed to tell stories. They are to be looked at from right to left, and you roll out the scroll to gradually reveal the story with one hand, whilst with the other hand you re-roll the portion you have just looked at. This makes for a very physical engagement with the work, and you can move backwards and forwards through the scrolls, if you want to re-look in more detail at any section. The scrolls can be narratives of battles, religious stories, fables, folk or supernatural tales, and they teach moral values as well as contain historical information. 

Scrolls can be up to 40 feet long and they are painted on paper or if on silk are backed with paper. The farthest (left) end is fitted with a roller around which the scroll is bound and when rolled up, they are secured with a silk cord and sometimes stored in specially made lacquerware boxes.

Emakimono are read in sections and there is often a written account of the story being visualised either at the start of the scroll, or interspersed between images.

Fukinuki yatai or "blown off roof" technique

I like the way the fukinuki yatai technique is used to bring in map-like perspectives. Fukinuki yatai translates as "blown off roof," or the use of a bird's-eye-view. Another approach is hikime kagibana, or the use of profile or back views of figures, facial views being eliminated, which enables clothes, postures or actions to take the weight of the narrative. 

Hikime Kagibana style 

The Genji Monogatari emaki is a hand-scroll of the Tale of Genji, a story often considered to be the world's first novel. The story follows Genji, the son of a Japanese Emperor and his descendants. It reflects the life of the Japanese nobility during the Heian period (794-1195) and features themes including ethics, aesthetics, and politics. I liked the fact that a drawing could be considered as a type of novel form, something that could hold a dense collection of stories and histories and ideas, and weave them all together in one art form. Most Western European drawings I would suggest are more like poems, condensed summations of experiences or thoughts, but there are times when you want to put a lot more into a drawing, and scroll formats are ideal for this. Time in this instance being about long periods of historical change, where events can unfold over several generations. 

From Genji Monogatari emaki

The Bayeux tapestry is of course the most well known English drawing in scroll form.  This is a drawing done in embroidered cloth, that is 70 metres long and 50 centimetres wide and it depicts the events surrounding the Norman conquest of England.

The tapestry as it is displayed at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Normandy

Just as there is in Emakimono scrolls there is considerable two dimensional invention in this long drawing. From the way that packs of horses are overlapped to suggest the forces of battle without having to compromise the flat scroll space, to the depiction of architecture as something that is cut open to show us what goes on inside. Size relativity is abolished, a person can be as big as a building and the top and bottom border operate as decorative containers to hold it all together, whilst a written narrative accompanies the images and adds to the textual complexity. It is a very powerful drawing and it is constructed within a format capable of dealing with grand historical moments. Again time is stretched out over the duration of these historical events, this time period being much shorter than some of the Emakimono scrolls, the story beginning with King Harold's experiences before the Battle of Hastings, and ending with the flight of Harold’s soldiers after the battle, a period of approximately two years. Along the top and the bottom the decorative borders also include scenes from the fables of Aesop and Phaedrus as well as scenes from husbandry and the chase. Once again there is a lot of information packed in, these scrolls were in effect the epic films of their day. 

John Pule: ‘Kehe tau hauaga foou’ (To all new arrivals) 

Enamel, oil, pencil, pastel, oil stick and ink on canvas 2700 x 10000 mm

More recently John Pule, the Niuean artist, has reinvented an old tradition of telling epic tales. I first came across John Pule in Paris when he was exhibiting at the Musée du Quai Branly and I immediately recognised his work as being a significant contribution to the way we can think about novelistic time in drawing. Pule's painting 'To all new arrivals' acts like a huge chart that maps a Pacific perspective onto a worldwide reality. Bombs and nuclear testing occur as images, alongside those of pollution and global warming. Contemporary and historical narratives that are both symbolic and instructive are developed; coupling a mythic past with contemporary images of conflict and tumult. Scenes from the New Testament act as vignettes inserted into our everyday world and diverse geographies and topographies are physically located into the same place. Once again there is a mix of fables and reality, historical time being compressed in order to achieve a sense of mythic time.

John Pule: To all new arrivals

The need to tell big, important stories, that are novelistic in impact is still there and I believe we are passing through times that will from a future perspective appear epic and located within new emerging mythic frameworks. So don't be put off by the effort, get working on the various chapters (drawings) you will need and set off to chronicle the crazy nature of your own times. 

Mythic map of Chapeltown: 9 ft x 4 ft Pen and ink

This is one of my own attempts at drawing on an epic scale. The drawing represents the collecting and fitting together of approximately two years of drawings done whilst walking through the streets of the area and weaving into the image various stories told to me while making objective drawings of street scenes in sketchbooks. It is hard to keep the concentration going over such a long period but always worth it in the end. 

Some sections of a scroll landscape / body 

I have used the scroll form myself at times. It is very useful if you are developing long images, in this case I was working out how a landscape and a body could become fused. 

See also:

Narrative drawing

Large scale detailed images

Drawing and time

More thoughts on drawing time

Here

Portraits and time

Writing about drawing (Time)

David Hockney on the same topic Skip the intro and begin watching as he begins to talk, he opens out several important issues in relation to spatial depiction, politics and the nature of perspective.  

Japanese aesthetics

Chinese ink drawing