pioneers / creativity / work

The Japanese painter Hokusai was best known for his famous woodblock print that is commonly called “The Great Wave.” A feat of Japanese art and style, Hokusai’s wave has become one of the most recognizable prints in the world.

But this great wave wasn’t Hokusai’s only wave. When he painted it in 1831, he was seventy-one years old, but waves were a subject he had been painting his entire life.

In the late 1830s, in a postscript to his work One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai wrote, “I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred and ten, everything—every dot, every dash—will live.” Hokusai understood that his skills as an artist were ever-evolving—there would always be more to learn.

Perhaps you haven’t drawn your great wave yet. Perhaps you’re not even sure what your great wave is, and that’s okay. Mastery takes time. Like Hokusai, all you can do is continue to paint them.

His first wave, painted at age thirty-three in 1792, was tiny.

His second wave, painted at age forty-four in 1803, was a bit bigger.

His third wave, painted only two years later in 1805, was much closer to what his great wave would eventually become. But Hokusai wouldn’t draw his wave again for more than twenty-five years.