TSUNAMI

WHENEVER A MAJOR world event disrupts the news cycle, artists I work with
know without asking that we’ll be looking for ideas. The images here were sent to me
very soon after an earthquake produced a tsunami that devastated Japan’s northeastern
coast on March 11, 2011. Ana Juan (above, left) used a limited palette and a red spot
on the belt of a kimono. Japan seems to demand simplicity and spareness as well as
the use of red, white, and black. Bob Staake colored Hokusai’s Great Wave red (above,
right), the same red that bathed Zohar Lazar’s moonlit sea (bottom, left). Lorenzo
Mattotti painted in stark black-and-white brushstrokes the desolate landscape left in
the tsunami’s wake (opposite).

JAPAN’S VISUAL CULTURE is rich
in symbols, and many artists used similar
imagery. In a sketch by Bob Staake (above,
left), the Japanese flag’s red circle becomes
Sisyphus’s boulder. The Economist ran a very
similar image on their cover (above). While
we were choosing among sketches, it became
clear that the natural disaster had produced
a man-made disaster of equal magnitude—a
nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear
power plant. Our choice as the cover for
the following week, “Spring Blossoms” by
Christoph Niemann (right), elegantly and
eerily showed the confluence of the twin
calamities.

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