A Mania for Drawing
From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs, but all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. 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 ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive. May Heaven grant me only this, that my determination does not fail. Written at the age of seventy-five by me, formerly Hokusai, today called The Old Man Mad About Drawing.
, Postscript to 'One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji' (1835)
Hokusai wrote this at seventy-five. He would live another fourteen years, working until the end. It’s a strange kind of boasting, perhaps, to declare that everything you’ve made in a legendary career is “not worth taking into account.” But it doesn’t read as false modesty. It reads as hunger.
What strikes me is the math of it. Hokusai maps out his future development decade by decade, as if mastery were an infinite horizon one never stops approaching. At one hundred and ten, he says, each dot and line will be “as though alive.” Not that he will make them alive, but that they will be alive. The ambition is somehow selfless even as it’s obsessive.
We live in a moment when the gap between wanting to make something and having something made has nearly closed. The friction of years, the decades Hokusai counts out, can be bypassed. An image that might have taken him days can be generated in seconds.
And yet there’s something here that can’t be compressed: the transformation of the maker. Hokusai isn’t just talking about better drawings. He’s talking about understanding the “essential nature” of birds and beasts, plants and insects. The work changes him; he is the work’s medium as much as the paper is. What does it mean to spend a lifetime at something when the outputs can be had cheaply? Hokusai seems to suggest the outputs were never quite the point. At seventy-five, he signs himself as one still mad about drawing. Not mad about having drawn, but about the drawing itself—the endless act of looking closer and trying again.