Art Coffee Break: Hokusai’s Method

Initial thoughts are that this is a wonderful book, certainly worth the price.

My deeper thoughts: This book made me think quite a bit about how we talk to people in the present and in the future about how to make art.

When I think about most art history that I read, I find it’s uncommon to locate anecdotes that discuss directly how the artist created their work. An offhand example - in reading two books about John Singer Sargent this year in 2025, I can estimate that only ten or so paragraphs were dedicated to how he worked. How did he hold his brushes? I found out eventually (he kept many brushes in one hand to select from, he hovered with his brush over the canvas for quite some time before making a mark) but it did take me a while. I waded through 1000+ pages about his family, how much money he made, his friends, drama that happened, what he ate for dinner and his eating style, and critical receptions before finding those five or six total pages about how he worked.

Hokusai’s Method is the opposite of that. This book shows directly how Hokusai worked on his art, and how he suggests different audiences of readers to work on their art. I was oddly shocked to see that this book contains pages where Hokusai shows readers how to hold a brush. Hokusai drew a picture of a hand holding a brush and how to make marks with that particular hold. It sounds like the simplest thing on the planet, but I can’t think of any other art book that shows this that I’ve seen. Usually there are countless watercolor swatches and step-by-step instructions, but it’s been very rare for me personally to see any image of any hand, ever. Even on instagram, I don’t often see artist hands in tutorial posts. I usually just see the brush. It struck me as I was reading this book that much of the art instruction that I’ve encountered is a little bit like watching a soccer game where all you see is the ball, and maybe for a split second moment, a shoe or two kicking it along.

In addition to the revolution of depicting a hand holding a brush, I have to appreciate Hokusai’s ability to angle himself towards the appropriate audience. The anthology kicks off with a whole volume dedicated to showing children how to draw simple scenes and animals by utilizing Kanji mnemonics that they’d already be learning how to write. Later on, there’s more advanced how-tos for older artists. But I also get the feeling he wouldn’t begrudge a 9 year-old of trying out the more difficult tutorials.

So, what we have here is a manual, a series of manuals about making art, dancing, different styles of art, all highly attuned to their audiences of various ages and pursuits. I had to think as I was reviewing the dance manuals that the depicted dances could have easily been lost to time without such clear illustrations.

If these are the gifts of infinite value that illustration gives to all of us in the future, why do people * still * pooh-pooh illustration so very much?

There’s certainly a part of human nature that loves mystery. It’s mysterious and alluring when an artist pops off dozens of paintings that look realistic and that speak to our soul. We love the forgotten, forbidden temple, because it contains puzzles, traps, and treasure.

Maybe, just maybe, illustration is seen as threatening to some of that mystery. It’s the path through the temple. Maybe it’s a little threatening to know John Singer Sargent’s exact workflow, because we’d rather keep experiencing mysterious awe, rather than see him as, you know, just a dude.

But I think both can co-exist at the same time. We can have Hokusai’s Method, and his drawings about how to draw a cat, and the cat can still speak directly to our souls 200+ years later. We can totally have Hokusai’s iconic wave and his illustration of a dancing guy with a beer belly at the same time. For that reason, this is the most enlightening art book I’ve held in my hands for a while.

Sketchbook Confessional May 2021

In May 2021 I had an active month of art and everything else. I got my iPad out and made a couple illustrations over the weekend after my second COVID shot.

I made a couple alternate versions of this too which you can scroll through below:

Drawing on the iPad has been fun. I never know where a lot of my ideas come from for digital art, yet I do like to iterate on them and get them out.

I was thinking about how when our eyes are closed, we can still see quite a bit.

It was also fun to paint indoors on a couple instagram lives. I painted this cat and also the flatirons in Boulder below on stream.

A cat I painted on an instagram livestream

The beginning of May 2021 will probably be the last month for a while where I am cooped up and only interacting with friends and fans over the internet and Instagram lives. In 2019, right before coronavirus struck, I was able to get out to comicons more and see people, and was also making paintings in public.

I painted this vision of Boulder’s flatirons from Chautaqua park using a photo I had taken a few weeks prior.

In May I painted outdoors in remote locations so much that it’s almost too much to write about what happened every day. I just love May and June, and all of summer really - there is so much light outside, tons of time to paint. During the last week of May, I went outside and painted 5 out of 7 days. In the spirit of the Calvin and Hobbes book: “The days are just packed.” The main reason why I can get out so much is all I really need is an hour to go paint. I can drive my car for five minutes and be somewhere spectacular near Boulder. Since I’m using gouache paint now instead of oil, I can paint quickly and the paint will dry quickly. It can still be very hard to carry the easel but I can usually get it to remote places pretty easily.

The best place to keep up with my plein air work is Instagram.

The paintings I came out of from plein air are what they are, what’s most important is that I get out and do them. Even if the painting on a certain day isn’t the best painting I’ve ever made, that’s okay, not every run I go on is the best run I ever have done.

My favorite painting from my recent outdoor paintings is this one I made of the Northfacing view from Artist’s Point on Flagstaff Mountain. Though the colors of the hills in the distance changed as I painted and led to some confusion for me, haha, I thought I got the curves of the mountains nailed down pretty well:

Plein air continues to be a process of chaos management. The colors of the mountains change as clouds go by, revisions have to happen, bugs often attack me or land on the painting (looks like a flower), it rains, I get poison ivy sometimes, I forget colors in my studio and have to remake them out in the world, or I ruin brushes if I run out of water to wash them. I’ve made enough mistakes to be overprepared most of the time, but there is always something to improve. Plein air painting is one of those endeavors that looks fluffy and quaint on the outside, and is in reality quite a tough experience. It reminds me of ice skating or ballet. The key I think is to just let the chaos happen and paint no matter what. At the end of the day, it’s all completely and totally worth it.

Reading Watching Playing:

After getting my second Pfizer shot, I felt a bit fragile. I took up playing Octopath Traveler again for a few days. I still can’t finish it, I get stuck on the bosses and grinding. I still play Dnd each week on zoom with some really lovely people.

I found Super Mario All Stars at Game Force in Boulder and started playing Mario 64 again. I bought the entire game to just play Mario 64. I remember playing Mario 64 on demo at Wal Mart in Frisco, CO, which was the closest Wal Mart we had. I eventually owned the game for 64 in the 90s and played the heck out of it. It’s very fun to play again on Switch, brought back a ton of memories.

The other 64 game I am playing again is Banjo Kazooie. Tons of fun, another late 90s 64 game, which, like Mario 64, also involves giant paintings of worlds in a big navigating dungeon.

I can’t really even put to words how fun it is to play Banjo Kazooie again.

To put myself to sleep at night, sometimes I will play Banjo Kazooie levels in my head. I did this even a year ago before re-owning the game. In my head, I will make an effort to imagine the map of the game. I will go through every puzzle of the first level, and also Treasure Trove Cove, and get every puzzle piece, note, Jinjo, and honeycomb piece. I’m not sure why I started doing this, but I think the maps of Banjo Kazooie are just big enough that you can imagine every piece of them pretty well without getting stuck. If I tried to imagine a map of something like Elder Scrolls I would just get lost. Overall it’s a good way to fall asleep. It gives my brain something to do that isn’t too overwhelming and isn’t too easy.

Fitness:

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

In fitness news, on May 1 I was able to finish the 25 mile Collegiate Peaks Trail Run. Wow, this was quite the race. I finished in just under 8 hours. This sounds like a wildly long time for a marathon-length race. What accounts for the time was the fact that the race has over 3000 feet of elevation gain and gets up past 9000 feet.

I could tell when the elevation of the race was kicking up a notch even without looking at my phone, because whenever the elevation increased to a certain point, I would start throwing up water. At first I threw up three times, then I lost count of how many times I threw up during the entire race.

The first hill in the race, I could laugh at a bit. You can see it rising like a friendly challenger from far away, and I sort of thought to myself “Haha, what masochist designed this course? LOL.”

Sure enough, at the top of that hill I was throwing up water at the aid station in front of a half-dozen volunteers. If a volunteer was there to witness it, I would start throwing up, like wave-particle duality. I wouldn’t throw up if a volunteer was not present. If a volunteer was there, I would throw up.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

There was a nice downhill after that, until there was another hill that seemed to Go. On. Forever. And you run up the hill in sand. This is the “Full-On Wake-Up Hill” in the map. That is not the name I had for it in my head while I was running the race. Calling it a ‘hill’ might also be too quaint, it makes it sound like an anthill, where it’s really more like running up a mountainside.

After the second mountainside/hill, the whole race is mostly downhill from there, which sounds nice, except my quads and hips were screaming. I didn’t merely walk a lot of the race. In addition to walking, at several points I cried, other times I sat down under a tree and tried to sip down some water. I crossed a river and a bunch of thorns tore up my leggings. I ended up getting a sunburn that didn’t melt off until a week later.

Possibly more traumatic, more exhilarating than anything, I did dances in my head during this race. I thought about a lot of things in life, and then there were moments where I didn’t have what anyone would call ‘thoughts.’

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I was running alone in a high mountain desert for almost 8 hours. I was fully struck, fully exposed to how bad 2020 was.

I’d lost a few family members, young and old. In addition to family members, almost every week in April, I could think of several friends of friends who had passed away. Loose ties, people I’d met or known about maybe just for a couple minutes, gone. Every single week was like this, every week another person or friend of a friend had passed.

In our routine lives, while we are checking emails, looking at data, driving to the store, it is very easy to forget trauma. When you’re alone in a desert, you don’t forget a single thing. Through the pain of running this race, I finally allowed some of the pain of loss to fully be felt, felt it deeply and in a very real way as my body carried me down the mountain.

On top of grieving people I’d lost, I started to get overwhelmed with feelings of love for my friends and people I missed. Have you ever had a dream and it seems like every good person you’ve ever met is in the dream? It was like some kind of Grand Friend Parade was playing in my head. “Remember all these people you love! Aren’t they great?” was what it seemed my mind was trying to say. If we’ve had a warm interaction in the past couple years, online or off, I probably thought about you during this race. Maybe what it was, was my mind summoning up as many reasons to keep going as it could find.

I finished 91st in the 25 mile overall, which I am happy about. This was very close to last. Just finishing was an accomplishment for me as I felt that several times during the race, a volunteer was going to have to ATV my butt down to Buena Vista and I would have to be rehydrated in a hospital after throwing up too much water.

The strangest part of the race happened the next day. I felt totally fine, as normal as I ever felt. I woke up in my Boulder apartment at 6 am and made coffee. Like I could run six miles no problem. This experience has led me to believe that many physical accomplishments truly are very mental, and to reiterate what one of our Leadville local legends says: we can do much more than we think we can.

Other exciting news: I took first in my group for Maxim Covergirl, and finished at 5th in Quarter Finals on May 27th! Thank you so, so very much for supporting my efforts in this. My page was able to raise over $2000 for Wounded Warriors, which is super exciting. With or without being in a contest, I’m still doing lots of bikini photos when I can. The swimwear photos are a form of proofing to myself that I can clean up okay, even if most of the time I am cranking away at computer stuff or covered in dirt and sweat while out on a run. Since I’ve had my second vaccination, I’m happy to say I might be taking swimwear photos at a real beach soon instead of just at my house.

Ra! More art!