Hokusai: Old Man Crazy to Paint

There's something outstandingly dedicated about Hokusai.

He doesn't shy away from things that are dangerous or that are challenging

or that are controversial.

And I think that's part of his heroism.

Hokusai is the person who invented modern art.

He is the person who taught us that you don't need to stick within

the tradition in which you were brought up.

You don't need to follow the master. You can cut and paste and bring things together.

CLUCKING

I must have first seen Hokusai prints when I was at the art school

in Bradford.

Their depiction of space, his way of looking at the world,

appealed to me straightaway.

Hokusai saw that, on a flat surface, everything is an abstraction,

everything. I mean, I was inspired by Hokusai there.

From the time when I was six until I was over 80...

..not a day went by when I didn't take up my brush.

And yet I still can't even paint a single cat.

It won't come out as I wish.

Hokusai's born in Edo, which is what we now know as Tokyo,

in the middle of the 18th century.

It's the biggest city in the world, so it's a thoroughly commercial,

thoroughly sophisticated place.

A consumer society, if you like.

He's born into the working-class districts of Edo,

and he's adopted into an artisan family.

Hokusai was born and lived for most of his life on the east bank of

the Sumida River. And the Sumida River is a locus of transport,

but also the river was turned over, particularly in the summer,

to fireworks and big barges with banquets and partying.

So I think Japanese people would have associated the Sumida River with pleasure.

Very young, he starts to get interested in drawing -

by his account, from the age of six, he was drawing things all the time.

And he's born in the right place at the right time -

a society with a huge hunger for

sophisticated renditions of the world around them.

And there's a huge demand for prints of the celebrities of the day.

In the city of Edo,

the Kabuki theatres and brothel district

on the northern outskirts of the city

were the subjects for the Floating World school -

this huge popular school of art.

It's a kind of joie de vivre, a mind-set,

which really got going in the middle of the 17th century.

So, by the time Hokusai's born in 1760,

it's already more than 100 years old.

The Floating World really

illustrates the world of downtown Edo.

I mean, in the way that, when we look at a Vermeer painting,

we disappear into a Dutch world

and we understand it through the painting.

I think that's what we can do through these prints.

For a minute, we can disappear into that world

and understand a little bit about it.

The process by which these prints were produced was a publisher -

that was the person with the money,

who knew which courtesan was really popular,

which actor was really popular.

And so the publisher would go to the artist and commission an image.

And it would then be taken to the carvers, who carved the blocks.

And when the blocks were finished, they were taken to the printer's.

As a teenager, Hokusai apprentices to a woodblock cutter.

So the first thing he does as an artist is learn how to cut the blocks.

It's a very complex process.

The original drawing, which is on very thin paper,

is reversed and actually glued down onto the blocks.

And the carver then carves to reproduce that brushed line in wood.

And that is the phenomenal skill of those carvers.

One of the greatest challenges,

when you're trying to carve a brushed line in wood,

is how you imitate that part of the line

where the ink is starting

to run out, which is highly valued aesthetically in calligraphy.

And these carvers are able to imitate that in wood.

And very often, they carve in the same direction

that the line was actually brushed.

Then Hokusai entered the studio of an artist called Katsukawa Shunsho,

who was right at the epicentre of the Floating World school

of popular art.

And Shunsho, his teacher,

was doing thousands of colour wood block prints of the Kabuki actors,

who were the superstars of popular culture of the day.

So Hokusai's earliest published prints are very much

in the style of his teacher.

JANGLING

We do have a very early print, from 1779,

of a very famous actor, Segawa Kikunojo,

the third generation in this particular acting lineage.

The really interesting thing is that you have an actor in front of

a partition and then, on the right of the actor,

we have a screen with waves.

And of course, water will become, throughout Hokusai's career,

a preoccupation for him.

He never abandons water or waves as a theme.

So even in the first work that we have, we see some of what's to come.

When he was very young, he was very talented.

I mean, prodigies are a bit rare in visual art.

They're common in music, aren't they?

But I mean, he was a little prodigy, like Picasso or something.

While Hokusai was struggling to make ends meet,

a man came and asked him to paint a picture for the Boys' Day.

Hokusai immediately prepared red pigment and drew a picture of Shoki,

the Demon Queller.

The customer very satisfied with the picture

and paid the artist two gold Ryo.

This was the payment that ultimately made Hokusai confident that he could

earn his living as an artist

and vowed to the bodhisattva Myoken that he would succeed.

Hokusai's family belongs to a particular sect of Buddhism.

But in fact, for Hokusai,

the divinity who becomes enormously important is Myoken.

Myoken is a Buddhist deity, if you like, a bodhisattva,

associated particularly with the North Star.

And at a certain point in his life,

he renames himself by the name we know today - Hokusai.

It means North Star.

North Star Studio, actually.

It's the one point in the heavens that doesn't move,

whereas the whole of the rest of the heavens move around it.

So, for Hokusai, it's a fixed point,

which is a potential source of huge spiritual strength.

We do know that, for Hokusai,

Myoken is associated particularly with the Kosho-ji Temple,

which still exists today.

It still has a hall within it dedicated to Myoken.

And Hokusai himself produces an image of this

quite early in his career.

He becomes acquainted with some very sophisticated cultural networks of

men of wealth, men of taste.

And in Edo at this time, you have these huge clubs of popular poets.

They come together and they have these outrageous poetry parties,

where they compose what are called crazy verses.

And it's Hokusai who's one of the artists of choice who they then hire

to do little beautiful designs to accompany their poems.

The first singing of the warbler is more impressive than listening to

your parents' objections to getting up early on a spring morning.

Moving into the early 19th century,

there's a new genre of popular illustrated literature

that is really big.

And Hokusai is working with the leading author of these adventure stories,

an author called Takizawa Bakin, providing the illustrations.

And these illustrated printed books are phenomenally popular.

Tametomo let loose a whistling arrow aimed at a ten-foot rock

shaped like a cactus.

The rock split right down the middle,

sending bits flying in all directions.

A big chunk fell into the sea

and spray shot up like the blow of a whale in the shallows.

Waves struck back against the land and the ground shook.

Oh, my God, I can't really believe you had to walk that far just to get

to the end of all these volumes!

Look at how many there are!

To think that I did it all...

-VOICEOVER:

-In the early 1980s,

I started a catalogue raisonne of Hokusai's prints.

And by the end of the 1980s compiled about 15,000 photographs.

And, in fact, doubled Hokusai's known work.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg with Hokusai.

By God, the guy's a genius, you know?

He's really amazing.

When Hokusai was 45, he came to the notice of the shoguns,

the military governor of Japan.

So the shogun put out the word that he'd like to have this artist do him a demonstration.

But the leading painter of the day, Tani Buncho, was also invited.

And Tani Buncho painted

these breathtaking landscapes and mountains

and things like that. And then it was Hokusai's turn.

And he got this sheet of paper and he spread it out

and he had a whole pot, which was just blue ink,

so he brushed this onto the length of this long sheet of paper.

And people were just sitting there.

The shogun was sitting there, thinking,

what on earth is this all about?

And so then he opened a basket and he took out a rooster

and he dipped the rooster's feet in red ink

and he then plopped the rooster along the length of this blue strip.

And then when he finished doing that, he said,

"This is autumn leaves on the Tatsuta River,"

which was a famous subject of classical painting.

And that took everybody's breath away.

His clever trick was a pure surprise to everyone present.

Buncho, who was sitting next to Hokusai, said,

"I could not keep my palms from sweating."

When he was 50, he stopped doing a lot of the commercial prints that he

did, and he just began travelling.

He went down to Nagoya for a while, and then this friend of his,

who was a pupil, said, "Look, stay with me as long as you want.

"Here's materials, paint as much as you like, draw as much as you like."

Then he invited a bunch of his friends for a party.

And he said, "Tonight, Hokusai,

"you're going to do some drawings for my friends."

People would call out subjects and they'd say,

"How about doing a dragon?"

-And he'd just...

-HE IMITATES DRAWING

..draw a dragon.

Or, "How about doing a prostitute?" you know?

And that carried on through the night, and a publisher,

who lived in that area, thought, this would make a great book to publish.

And so they compiled all these things, and that was

the first manga, which means random drawings.

Enormously influential. And they really took off.

Hokusai himself titled Hokusai Manga.

He used the word manga.

But each illustration is quite different from modern manga.

It's a very good point. Hokusai's manga, when you look at it,

it really draws you in.

But there is no story line.

Whereas Hokusai's illustrated novels propels you through visually,

so Hokusai's manga and Hokusai's illustrated novels,

when taken together,

can be seen as a foundation for contemporary manga.

They're separate and they're different,

but they all are incremental steps to getting what we have today

as a fully line-driven narrative.

He did observe all kinds of things,

all kinds of people.

I mean, the drawings are marvellous drawings.

They're beautiful. I mean, he's always looking fresh.

He's a great artist, Hokusai.

A great artist, yeah.

Traditionally, Japanese people

believe the zodiac cycle repeats every 60 years.

So the big change comes when Hokusai turned 61.

And there's a sense in which, if you live that long, you're born again.

Your zodiac cycle is repeating so you can, in a sense,

start your life again.

60, for every Japanese person who should live that long, was a marker.

It meant that the first significant part of your life was finished.

And that, from now on,

you had a whole different group of things

that you should be attending to.

Hokusai's never happy with one name.

He keeps on kind of ringing the changes.

Once he's passed 60, he becomes the old man, crazy to paint.

So the changes, the big changes,

seem to correspond to changes in style,

changes in interest. We can see him embarking on a new phase of artistic experimentational growth.

People think of Japan as closed during this period - it wasn't.

The Dutch go up to Edo, now Tokyo, every year.

They know that Hokusai is the biggest name in town.

They commission paintings from him.

The big commission of his early to middle 60s came in 1822.

Dutch merchants, working in Japan,

commissioned Hokusai to do a series of paintings showing typical scenes

of Japanese life, but they're absolutely unique

for the very interesting hybrid style that he came up with

where there's a deep sense of spatial recession

within the picture,

a deep European-style perspective system.

It's also as if there is a single light source

casting shadows in the picture.

This is completely revolutionary in a Japanese context.

So we've got Japanese scenes painted in this hybrid,

halfway between Japanese and European style.

There's an incredible scene where travellers are suddenly caught in

a thunderstorm.

There's a lightning flash across the back of the picture.

And the figures are caught in this fitful light.

It's almost like a strobe light

with a really dark, thunderous sky behind.

And again, this is really totally revolutionary

in a Japanese context.

Things seem to be going well.

He has this major commission from the Dutch which

he successfully completes.

But then, in the late 1820s,

Hokusai seems to be hit by a succession

of personal life challenges.

He had a minor stroke of some kind.

Then suddenly, in 1828, his second wife died.

And he's constantly exasperated by the behaviour of his grandson,

running up huge gambling debts.

And Hokusai was continually paying off his debts.

And so he got into debt.

And finally, Hokusai lost his house and then took refuge in a temple.

He hid out.

This spring, no money,

no clothes.

Barely enough to eat.

If I can't come to an arrangement by the middle of the second month...

..then no spring for me.

One of the key documents for visualising Hokusai in his 80s

is a drawing

which was done by one of his pupils.

Tsuyuki Kosho is his name.

And it shows Hokusai and his daughter, Oei,

in very humble rented dwellings.

Hokusai has a heater quilt pulled over him,

and Tsuyuki quotes Hokusai.

No matter who comes to visit, I never leave the heater.

When I'm tired, I pick up the pillow beside me and go to sleep.

When I wake from sleep, I pick up my brush and keep drawing.

The 1820s is clearly a difficult decade,

but that recession from the world

is a way of pulling himself together

and pulling together the ideas that are going to become the triumph of

his next decade, the 1830s, his 70s.

And it's at this point that we begin

to see the germ of what will become the Thirty-six Views Of Mount Fuji.

Ever since earliest recorded times,

Mount Fuji has been important to Japanese people.

It's by far the largest physical feature in the Japanese islands

and dominates completely central Japan and the area around it.

It was celebrated in literature, but more importantly, perhaps,

for Hokusai, Fuji was always considered a deity.

And the whole idea of the series

Thirty-six Views Of Mount Fuji is to set up interesting pictures that

make Mount Fuji the fulcrum of our world, the centre of our universe.

I think, in the middle of his career, we can see his interest migrating.

The human interest is there but, increasingly,

his eye is drawn to the landscape behind it.

Hokusai is the guy who enables landscape within the Japanese artistic tradition,

the first one who begins to focus on the landscape as landscape.

The Great Wave is undoubtedly Hokusai's most famous work by far.

The Japanese title is Kanagawa-oki Nami Ura,

which we translate as Under The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.

And we're out at sea in the Pacific Ocean,

looking back under this great sudden storm wave towards Mount Fuji on

the horizon in the distance.

Hokusai has digested the lessons of European perspective that he learnt

in his middle years, and now he's playing with that.

Mount Fuji is the highest physical feature in Japan by far.

And yet Hokusai has arranged the picture

so that it appears that Mount Fuji

is dwarfed by the great storm wave, and the foam

and the water that comes off the great wave

then starts to seem like snow falling onto the peak of Mount Fuji,

which famously was always snow-covered all the year round.

Many people don't notice at first

that there are actually boats in this picture.

There are three of these fast delivery boats,

and they've taken delivery of a catch from the fishing fleet,

and they're trying to deliver it as fast as possible

to the fish markets in the centre of Edo.

And then suddenly, this freak wave has come up

and the oarsmen are all cowering down.

They've obviously made the decision

to go straight through the wave rather than try and escape from it.

So it's a huge drama,

and these are very heroic people at work.

It's typical of Hokusai to focus more on the world of working people

than anything else.

We have a relationship being described between a very dynamic

world of water

and of human endeavour dwarfed by the energies of nature.

Then in the middle, we have Fuji - this unmoving thing,

a still centre to a world of change.

Most of the prints in the Thirty-six Views have some kind of relationship

between human activity and the mountain.

So we see people in the landscape with their hats blowing off...

..people working in Edo itself.

Hokusai is interested in the human world,

he's interested in the natural world,

he's interested in the spiritual world.

Above all, he's interested in the relationship between these things.

You know, the sea is totally

in charge of these little fragile boats.

And so, however beautiful a Hokusai work is,

it is this sense of awe in the face of nature

that, at once, one is aware of.

This curve of the wave,

which I find to be the most difficult thing

when painting the sea,

is made from many curves.

And the fact that that line changes adds to the movement of the wave.

I mean, what is exciting about it, of course, is that distilled moment

before this wave is going to crash.

I see it in one of his earlier paintings -

an early wave...

..which is pretty solid...

..and static. I mean, it could be a building, really.

It's doesn't immediately say water.

I mean, I think there were 20 years or something between these waves, and...

Ah! It's a sort of earlier prelude leading up to...

..what has become the iconic image of Hokusai.

That image of The Great Wave

has entered not just my consciousness,

but the world's consciousness, and so it's sort of inside one.

You know, you're always up against it,

like you're up against Rembrandt in a self-portrait.

I'm really coming to think that, in this image particularly,

Hokusai is inventing modern animation.

The Great Wave is caught

just at the moment where it's about to fall.

And all of the little tentacles of foam are just caught in suspended

animation, like the claws of an animal,

coming down, threatening these fishing boats.

This, to me, is anticipating modern animated cartoons.

Disney animation, for example, is very similar.

You've got a bold outline and very flat colour.

And it's entirely probable that

people who worked at Disney in the early days

had seen Japanese prints, had possibly even seen the technique.

And that aesthetic carried over into the early days of films.

The Great Wave would have been printed from

four planks of cherry wood.

One side was so-called key block,

which would have printed the outlines and the text on the image.

The rest of the blocks would have been left in

relief to print each of the colours in succession.

Hokusai would have been involved in making the decisions about what

colours to print, including the brilliant Prussian blue pigment.

But as the printing run wore on,

the publisher and the printers would start to cut corners.

And sometimes, the colours would change.

The audience for a print like this is anybody.

If you had just more than the price of a double helping of noodles,

you could buy a Great Wave in 1831.

These are mass-produced -

maybe as many as 8,000 impressions of this design printed at the time.

It's an incredibly democratic art form.

NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, has brought over special 8K cameras,

and they're going to be filming in the most incredible detail.

And therefore, we can blow things up

and start to really appreciate the detail

of these amazing works by Hokusai.

There's a level of detail that we're able to see

that's beyond what we can see with our naked eyes.

We begin noticing things that we had never noticed before

when we've been looking at them for years and years in the flesh.

-This is a treat.

-Yes, it is. It sure is.

In Japan, interestingly enough,

the most important print is not The Great Wave.

The most important print is what we know as Red Fuji.

Clearly, in Japan, in the modern period, Fuji itself

became the centre of a very important set of ideas about national identity.

You didn't want Fuji from a distance - you wanted Fuji in its glory.

Oh, God, look at that!

Wow!

Oh, that's astonishing!

What's happening here, I wonder?

I'm seeing something like a wiping line.

-Yes, yeah.

-Are you seeing those kind of horizontal...

-Oh, I do.

The top lines of these clouds have been fairly smoothly cut

whereas the bottom edge consistently has been abraded.

He's using really abrasive leaf over rush.

You use it as a kind of sandpaper to...

..give it... It's not a sharp line.

It gives it a kind of fudged quality.

It couldn't be anything else.

It couldn't be anything else. What an amazing effect.

Uh-huh.

I mean, it's brilliant. It's a brilliant conception.

Because, otherwise, it would look totally dead.

-Yeah.

-I suspect a lot of the reproductions that have been made,

-it probably is just a straight line.

-Mm-hm.

What could that be? Nothing but surprises.

Certainly, this is a really large volume as well.

When I started really working on his art,

I realised that what came to be known as Red Fuji

Hokusai never meant to be read.

In fact, he probably would have been scandalised if he saw it looking

like it looks in these pictures here.

But I was visiting a Swiss collector in Basel, Dr Walter Verling,

who had a small collection, and we were looking at his prints,

and then he said, "I have one other print I'd like to show you,

"but I have to apologise for it because it's so faded."

And then he pulled out this print, which is in the albums here.

And I saw what he meant

because the colours were very light in the sky

and on the mountain itself.

And it was a very different kind of tonality and a very different effect

than on all the impressions I had ever seen in my life, which were

hundreds, but then I looked and noticed that there's

a little penumbra of blue around

the tip of the mountain.

And I realised that that had to have been printed

specially from a specially inked and carved block,

and it was intentional.

It wasn't accidental. And so then I looked more carefully,

and I realised there's nothing accidental about the print at all,

and that that was the earliest impression in the world

and that that was what Hokusai saw and meant to be seen.

It was harder to print for various reasons.

And the publishers, who weren't very scrupulous,

they were just cranking them out,

and so everybody got caught up with Red Fuji.

And it was enormously popular in his lifetime and afterwards.

What he was in fact revealing was the quality of light

just before dawn.

It was like a revelation.

Oh, God!

Incredible.

What this technology has given me a chance to discover

is that the Pink Fuji

is even more complex than I had even dreamed of

because I've been used to thinking that these little treelike shapes at

the base of the mountain were all printed from one block.

And, in fact, they're printed from three different blocks,

inked with very subtly different shades of blue.

And so it gives the whole forest a very lively quality,

which is extraordinary.

You think of it as such a monumental and abstracted design but, actually,

there's so much more subtlety in there.

Up here, you see these little triangles of pale green

along the slope of Mount Fuji?

Never, ever noticed that before.

But it's clear that all of this has been very carefully calculated.

And it gives life.

And it's almost like the trees are shimmering, aren't they?

-They are, yeah.

-They're alive.

The discovery of this new version of the Red Fuji is a wonderful example

of how something that has become a conventional icon of Japanese art

in general is actually not what Hokusai had in mind at all.

So what I was able to say to the Swiss collector was, Walter,

this is not a faded print.

VOICE BREAKING: This is the best one I've ever seen.

It's really a moment for both of us.

The Thirty-six Views Of Mount Fuji did prove incredibly popular.

And then, straight on from that,

they start to issue even more Fuji designs -

the famous One Hundred Views Of Mount Fuji.

And yet further opportunity for Hokusai

to explore Fuji from all sides,

in all weathers, from all vantage points.

And, in fact, some of the compositions in this book are incredibly eccentric.

He's deliberately stretching the limits of composition

to pay homage to the mountain.

At the back of volume one of One Hundred Views Of Mount Fuji is like

a little potted autobiography.

This is Hokusai looking back at his career up to this point,

up to his mid-70s, and basically dismissing it.

From the age of six, I had the desire to copy the form of things.

And from about 50, my pictures were frequently published.

But until the age of 70, nothing I drew was worthy of notice.

At 73 years,

I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees...

..and the structure of birds,

animals, insects and fish.

Thus, when I reach 80 years, I hope to have made increasing progress,

and at 90 to see further into the underlying principle of things

so that, at 100 years, I will have achieved a divine state in my art.

And at 110, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.

Hokusai is saying, well, you know, I've been pretty mediocre,

but I've done a lot of work.

But you haven't seen anything yet

until you've seen what's going to happen when I go forward from this.

He always thought he'd get better.

Well, the Chinese have a saying, painting is an old man's art.

Meaning you should get better because you know more

and you're more experienced at doing it.

I like to think I'm like that, actually.

People say I've gone off, but I don't think so.

There is a number of quite informal self-portraits by Hokusai from

different stages in his career.

And he's beguilingly informal in the way he depicts himself.

It's not a pompous view at all.

In the early period,

when he's working a lot on the popular literature,

he comes in almost as a tiny cartoon character in some of the pictures.

But later in life, thinking of his 80s,

he does a little lightning sketch of himself pointing,

gesticulating quite excitedly to something outside the picture

and seems to be talking to somebody at the same time.

And then the text above the self-portrait

is apologising for not producing

what the publisher wants and saying that he's sending instead

some old drawings which Hokusai did in his 40s, so four decades earlier.

And although he was an immature artist at that time,

maybe there's something amongst these drawings that you can use.

He trundled around for his entire life with a cart

that had his archive in it -

all of his drawings, all of his copies of paintings that he'd seen.

But in 1839, his house caught fire.

He jumped out the window with his brush

and his daughter jumped out the window with her brush,

but that cart was burned.

Hokusai rushed out of the house with only a painting brush in one hand.

His daughter, Oei, immediately followed him.

They lost all their possessions, clothes and painting materials.

They were nearly naked and looked like homeless beggars.

And from that time on, he didn't do any more drawings,

he didn't do any more prints, to speak of,

and his life took a radical change.

In Hokusai's 80s, and certainly in the last three years, 88, 89, 90,

it's almost exclusively paintings that he's working on.

I mean, he was 88.

He was going for it.

He was just, like, "I'm going to do something new."

And he, at that point, couldn't care whether anybody else notices or not.

He was going to go as far as he could for as long as he could.

In his last years, we have a sequence of paintings

where he's trying to

bring the world as we know it to life on the page.

He's trying to reach beyond the surface of things

to the life of things.

And in the British Museum, there's a wonderful scroll of a duck -

the duck is actually swimming on the page.

Wow! Astonishing.

Just astonishing.

I'm so much more aware of individual strokes.

Yeah, absolutely.

Cos you can see that there's lots of small, black accents

which are separate strokes.

Completely separate strokes.

-And different colours.

-Black on top of grey.

Yeah.

It's a wonderful, wonderful painting.

When I look at the feathers, you can

just see that they're varying thicknesses of line,

they're spaced not evenly, not uniformly.

I mean, there's just a rawness about the detail in that painting.

Nobody but he could have drawn the ducks.

HE CHANTS AND SINGS

I think that, like many people in Japan,

he had completely internalised Buddhism.

It wasn't a set of beliefs, it was a way that you lived your life,

and he saw it all around him.

The way that he drew birds in the sky, the way that he drew plants,

it isn't just a person who is just sitting in front of a plant

and transcribing it

or sketching it out.

It was a person who digested it, made it their own, internalised it,

and had become the plant or the fish or whatever it was.

When I'm looking at Hokusai's late paintings,

they're the most incredible art works.

Technically, they're extraordinary.

But it's not just a tour de force.

There's a vital consciousness inhabiting those creatures,

those figures, that is looking out at me, wanting to engage with me.

And that just fills you with energy.

The Chinese say you need three things for painting - the hand,

the eye and the heart. Two won't do,

which is, I think, very, very good.

It's a spectacular painting.

Absolutely incredible.

Both of them are. What a pair.

I mean, there's no doubt about it,

that they were meant to be hung together as a pair.

Cos we have the same mounting, the same size,

the dragon and the tiger is a traditional subject

in East Asian art, and...

..they have pretty much identical signatures from Hokusai's 90th year.

The dragon is crawling up out of a tornado that it's making itself

and staring out at us with this incredibly inhabited expression.

Hokusai has painted dragons dozens of times

at this point in his career.

But at 90, in the final months of his life, God knows how he did it,

but he cracked it.

We felt, when we were looking at images of this painting,

that it must have been painted in reverse -

basically, starting with the colour of the paper,

which is the highlights

all over the composition,

and then working back through

a succession of ever darker shades of grey ink

until you finally get to the black. So you're working in reverse.

Hokusai has mentally worked all of this out before he even touches

the brush to the paper.

So, underneath all of these individual dragon scales

is a line which has completely different character

from its neighbour.

He's just totally incapable of painting the same line twice.

But always remembering to leave, at the edge of the spines,

the unpainted paper as the highlight.

You can't make any mistakes with this kind of painting.

It's not an oil painting where you could rub something out

and try it again.

Once you put the brush to paper, you're committed.

I just... Full of awe.

How did he do it?

In 1849, he was renting a lodging from a temple called Henjoin,

doing the paintings of his final few months.

He died at the end of the fourth month of his 90th year,

so there's just a few months when the paintings which are signed "aged 90", must have

been done. And these include the sublime painting

of the dragon flying into the sky around Mount Fuji

and going off up into the heavens...

It's glorious.

..which is rightly regarded as

one of the most sublime late Hokusai works.

It's so moving because he's bringing together the imagery

of such a long career.

You take one look at the painting,

and what jumps out at you is this startling, almost frightful,

oversimplification of Mount Fuji.

Then, to the top of the painting,

is a smudge, which you induce is clouds,

and then in the smudge there's some kind of a figure.

But then you see it's a dragon floating up and

drifting up above the mountain into the sky and disappearing.

And then you think, well, son of a gun! You know.

That's almost like an epitaph for himself.

He's saying, "So long," you know.

"Enjoy my work." You know, "You will really get a lot

"out of these pictures if you get into it like I did!"

In the little inscription that Hokusai puts next to his signature,

he says, "I'm aged 90, I was born in a Dragon Year."

I am painting this on a Dragon Day in my 90th year.

HE PRAYS

There's something so outstandingly dedicated about Hokusai

and about his stalwart approach to what he was doing.

It's sort of incomparable.

I think that he was one of the great heroes.

S... Sorry, I'm crying.

He never gave up.

He kept experimenting.

He kept doing new things.

He just felt that he had a connection with life, which was precious.

He worked all his life.

He had a long life.

I mean, he just worked, didn't he? That's all he did.

Well, that's all I do, actually.

But I'm not as good as Hokusai.

If heaven will afford me five more years of life...

..then I'll manage to become...

..a true artist.