ART

(Photographic Series)

DUE NOV 15

In the readings this week, you should come across the work of Hokusai. He was a great Japanese woodblock printmaker who created a series of prints during the Edo period dedicated to Mt. Fuji. In fact, he did 36 views of it from all over. From that, we get examples like A Thunderstorm Below the Summit:

You can see the rest of the series here:

http://www.hokusaionline.co.uk/code/36_views_mount_fuji.html (Links to an external site.)

For this journal entry, I want you to make a PowerPoint presentation or a Word document where you channel Hokusai and the Japanese tradition of series. I want you to pick a subject matter--like your car, home, Black Mountain or some other prominent landscape where you live--and create a series of views of that subject. 36 might be a little overkill! So, for your series, I just want you to create 8 different views of the subject matter. You don't need to even write anything! Just have fun taking pictures of the same subject matter in different ways. Look over Hokusai's work for ideas. The concept of a series like this is to gain a better understanding of a certain subject matter by viewing it from different points of reference.

 

Just to reiterate what I wrote above in the overview, the Europeans were familiar with Hokusai's series. In fact, an important player in the development of modern art was Cezanne who just happened to do his own series of a mountain near him. He did many paintings of Mt. St. Victoire, in a similar way that Hokusai did. Here are some of Cezanne's paintings in that series: