David Haughton
March 1- 31, 2018
Reception Saturday, March 3, 2018, sponsored by the Canadian Consulate General of Seattle
Artist’s Talk: “Hokusai and Me”, Saturday March 10, 2018

A new series of landscape paintings by Vancouver, BC artist David Haughton pays homage to the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, an artistic ‘hero’ of Haughton’s for many years. The new work further develops Haughton’s series “40 Views of Mount Baker” with dramatic and intriguing views of the mountain and surrounding areas of the Northwest Coast. The exhibit includes some of the original images, with the addition of many new views of Washington’s Mount Baker.

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.”