40 Views of Mount Baker: Homage to Hokusai
Visual Space Gallery
3352 Dunbar Street, Vancouver, BC
September 14 – 27, 2017; noon-5 pm daily

INSTALLATION VIEWS

A new series of landscape paintings will be shown in September, 2017, titled 40 views of Mount Baker – Homage to Hokusai. The series is in homage to the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, an artistic ‘hero’ of David Haughton’s for many years.

Hokusai is best known as for his woodblock series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Later in his career, Hokusai worked under the name “Gakyō Rōjin Manji” (The Old Man Mad About Art).

Hokusai wrote: “From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things, and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings. Yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking in to account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvelous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.”

Constantly seeking to produce better work, Hokusai apparently exclaimed on his deathbed at the age of 87, “If only Heaven will give me just another ten years… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.”