Artist study on K Hokusai

We completed another one of our Artist again using Meet the Masters program.  This time our artist was K. Hokusai.  I could't find a Mike Venezia book on this particular artist so we made do finding information on him on the web.  He was an interesting character changing his name more than 30 times in lifetime and moving more than 100 times.  He is most famous for his art work the Wave.

Mount Fuji is in the background

The children and I loved this quote from one of his writings:

"I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie"   Hokusai died at the end of 88. For our Art assignment we were to create a black and white Bamboo painting.  We had read that in Japan some artist study the art of drawing bamboo for years.  We watched several You tube videos on this in order to try to get it right. Princess decided to add a little wildlife to her art so we have snakes, ants and butterflies amongst the Bamboo. Little Man decided to add a little green to the leaves Finished work Finished work. My attempt at this style of art.  We all added a little Japanese writing to our pictures and it is meant to say Bamboo forest:) We noticed that most of the art work we looked at had writing on it so we decided to try to add a little writing to our art work even though that was not part of the assignment.