New Woodblock Prints of Hokusai’s Previously Unpublished “Book of Everything”

This is pretty cool: in collaboration with the British Museum, a team led by woodblock printmaker David Bull (who I first wrote about back in 2005¹) is carving woodblocks and creating prints from a series of previously unpublished drawings by legendary Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.

The Museum has in their possession a group of drawings by Hokusai that were apparently intended for use in the production of a series of books. For reasons unknown to us now that project was cancelled, but the drawings survived, and we have selected 12 of them for a new subscription series.

For more details of the collection of images, please refer to this page of the British Museum website. But here, we can simply note that the drawings fall into a number of categories, and our set will reflect that diversity. Hokusai’s series was intended to take his readers through aspects of Japanese historical culture, and we will meet Buddhist deities, warriors from ancient China, and historical landscapes, along with more prosaic scenes of the natural world.

The print shown above was the first one to be sent out in January. But look at this original drawing from the collection:

Wow. That is shockingly modern — like a 60s superhero comic or a still from 60s anime. I hope they reprint this one!

Here’s a video from the British Museum of Bull talking about the project:

If you make woodblock prints for a living, you know the name Hokusai, and if you’re a woodblock carver and you hear about original drawings from Hokusai that have never been carved into prints you would most likely do a little happy dance.

(via open culture)

1. Hooo boy, there are parts of that post that did not age well. Bull, however, is still doing his thing.↩

• art
• David Bull
• Katsushika Hokusai
• remix
• video