Viewing Hokusai Viewing Mount Fuji - Couverture souple

Price, Jonathan Reeve

 
9780971995475: Viewing Hokusai Viewing Mount Fuji

Synopsis

A meditation on Hokusai, taking apart the prints in the series, 36 Views of Mount Fuji, zooming in digitally, assembling a 21st century interpretation of his practice, as he celebrates the natural landscape of a nation coming up with a new idea of itself.

Each image starts with one of Hokusai’s views, disassembles it, constructs a new picture out of the pieces, as a visual critique, and adds floating text chunks—brief observations, snippets of poetry, stray thoughts.

Thumbnails of the originals let you compare the before-and-after, gauging Hokusai’s wood-block print against the pixelated, sliced, and diced collage, and the scattered writings that reflect on his drive for immortality, his exploitation of newly available pigments, his fondness for the interplay of text and image, and his love for the ordinary workers and travelers out in the country.

An Afterword discusses the path that the artist and poet, Jonathan Reeve Price, took to this homage to Hokusai. He sees parallels between Hokusai’s art practice and the functions available in software such as Photoshop, tactics that he has adapted to our century—zooming, revising, layering, making depth hard to read, indulging in bright blocks of color. Hokusai created more than a thousand images combining poetry and imagery, and Price points to those artworks as justification for his own mixing of language, line, and color in his responses.

In 19th century Japan, the number 36 might have reminded literate customers of the number of the immortals—the classical poets of Japan and China. But when Hokusai’s series of 36 prints sold well, he added another 10 pictures. So this book offers a total of 46 digital images, followed by a critical essay, and an FAQ about the author’s background. Holding this book in your hand may not make you live forever, but, who knows, it might bring you some of Hokusai’s spirit.

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À propos de l'auteur

Starting with a Doctorate in Fine Arts from Yale, Jonathan Reeve Price worked in conceptual art and concrete poetry, showing in co-op galleries and museums in New York. But he quit the art world to join Apple, where the introduction of MacPaint was a life-changing event for him. He has taught information architecture, web writing, and technical communication through the University of California, Santa Cruz, New Mexico Tech, and UNM, and he has spent many years coaching writers and managers in communication groups in high tech companies in Silicon Valley and Japan. He lives with his wife Lisa and two Corgis on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.