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”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”
congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!
Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?
Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!
Please view Hokusai’s gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.
An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.
A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.
This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we’ll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn’t present, and the location is uncertain. And it’s a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small – but the feeling of “ocean” isn’t really there yet, is it? It’s unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that’s okay, there’s still time.
And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!
Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you’re striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he’d only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that “if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive.” He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn’t believe he was finished – he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.
And he wasn’t finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.
It’s all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It’s not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that’s not what motifs are for – each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They’re there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.
I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”, so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like “I don’t think those translations are very accurate”, so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it’s all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested “the push-off is a transportation route”, which wasn’t particularly helpful.
All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.
yes! the optics of this technique are great - because they are relying on two fronts of fear, they want to scare the population they are suppressing, BUT the also need to scare their support base
a lot of people who are in support of sending in suppressing forces really believe that TheirAmerica™ is under attack by militant revolutionary forces that want to destroy cities and murder citizens or whatever. This is a narrative that helps maintain the far right’s grip on the moderate segments of their support base , and it really enhances that narrative being able to show them images of protesters that look like this
But having to show protesters that look like they are there to entertain a children’s birthday party deprives the right-aligned media of a valuable tool for controlling that narrative, effectively making their position “be very afraid of these silly people, we actually need to send in the army because they are so silly” and it destroys a main tool of their propaganda machine.
plus it makes it hard for the police, who understand what it’s going to look like when they claim they beat up the person in the inflatable party costume because they “felt they were in danger”
not to mention they have no idea who is in the costume - they could beat them up and then have it turn out to be a 14 year old girl, which is not beyond the scope of things that have already happened, but is the sort of thing that always gets a strong reaction from the public and is definitely not a good situation for the cops to be in
This is a reminder for those who handmake Christmas presents that now is not too early to start. It may in fact be a good time to start if you have a lot to make/your craft takes a long time. You should maybe start it now, whether that’s brainstorming or actually doing the crafts!
Translating this into tumblr’s preferred public service announcement format for this kind of alert:
i hate how widely mocked the free the nipple thing is like even among leftists. like yeah i do think its bizarre to frame a bare chest as inherently sexual for half of the population and perfectly fine and neutral for the other half. i think this should be seen as like 101 frankly
This current trend of people being very openly hostile towards polyamory has made me realize a few things and among those things is that, apparently, to many people the bad thing about someone cheating in a relationship is simply that they are having sexual/romantic relations with multiple people at the same time. Like, that’s what the issue is to many of them that’s what’s morally wrong about it. Not the fact that they’re going behind their partner’s back to break a serious established boundary and their trust. Which is crazy
reblog to tell a 14 year old that these are the very, very hard years and they’re not wrong to feel the way they do.
I had a fifteen minute long crying session yesternight over the fact that all I was 10 years ago, at the ripe old age of 14, is lost and lonely, and now, at 24, I am neither and that filled me with so much gratitude
reblog to tell a teenager that these aren’t actually the best years of your life and that things can and will get better when you have independance and maybe are away from your situation right now.
Its me reblog to tell me that
i read a great post somewhere recently that i’ll never hope to find again, but that i’d like to try and paraphrase here. it was written by a mother who was summarizing how she’d been helping her 11 year old son prepare for puperty, as well as what she did when she realized she failed him in certain ways. i thought it was really beautiful.
she talked about what she had prepared him for first: that his body was going to spend the next several years going through physical changes, and that these changes could at times be frustrating, confusing or just simply unpleasant. but she and him kept getting into these spats and little arguments, and eventually she realized she forgot another really important thing that’s changing a lot in your teens and preteens: your brain.
she sat him down and apologized, firstly, for missing such an important detail, then explained it. she essentially described it as, until your preteens, your brain only really needs to know how to handle kid stuff, and by age 8, 9, 10, you’ve had A LOT of practice. you’re REALLY good at that level of humaning. but then puberty begins, and puberty is basically one big transition from child to adult, so everything, including your brain, is updating hardware to become capable of handling adult stuff. but the one thing it can’t do is grow in the practice and experience for you. unfortunately, and this sucks, we all just kinda have to live a while until we learn how being an adult works.
and it’s VERY dysregulating, physically and mentally and emotionally. your body and mind are basically swept out from under you, and it takes years for them to stop changing, so it’s hard to get used to them WHILE they’re changing. and that’s really, really frustrating. in that post, she said her son confessed he just snaps and says angry things, and he doesn’t know why he does it and he feels awful when it happens. puberty is easily one of the hardest things a human being goes through. you’ve never dealt with anything like that before, and you probably will never deal with anything quite like that again. to top it all off, you’re usually surrounded by other teenagers going through puberty, all having your own moments of lashing out or struggling, and you’re all doing your best with a very tough situation. what’s worse, a lot of adults forget or downplay how bad their own puberty was; they act like they were being dramatic, or they act like it was their fault for not handling it better; and therefore they act like YOU’RE being dramatic and at fault now.
it’s not your fault. you are doing your best. so many teenagers do not want to feel angry and confused and like the world is out to get them and they have to lash out for their pain to be heard. i’m so sorry people aren’t listening. one of the hardest things about puberty is how our society minimizes it, and leaves teenagers dealing with so much of this on their own. i know it doesn’t help you now, but i promise one day, your mind and body will be done growing, and it’ll be so much easier to manage everything. you’ll get the practice and experience, you’ll get the physical and mental stability of a non-puberty body. it DOES get better.
but it’s not your fault that it’s so hard right now. if you have any trusted adults or older teenagers in your life—family, teachers, counselors, other students, etc—i think it’d be a great idea to talk to them about some of the feelings and unwanted behaviors you’re dealing with. you can write them a letter to get the conversation started, if that’s easier. but please don’t just bottle it up. you deserve help, and sympathy, and guidance. you shouldn’t have to do this alone.
My mom swears she heard a knock at the door just now. My dog went apeshit barking about it. My mom goes to answer the door. Nobody is there. She looks down. There is a chipmunk looking up at her from the front mat. I don’t know what he wanted. He then ran away.
That’s the fairy actually. No walrus today
I admit that this crossed my mind.
I told the story wrong. My mom is incensed. Her corrections:
There were THREE knocks.
I did not specify that the chipmunk was standing upright on its hind legs, “his little arms hanging at his sides.”
The chipmunk did NOT run away. He and my mom stared at each other for a while. My mom shut the door in his face.
ALT
ALT
