Ekphrastic

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

humanist55

The eponymous Great Wave
circles the centre of the woodcut
in an exaggerated piling up of water
as when two waves pass through
each other and multiply their height
and over-face themselves.


We are far out to sea off Kanagawa
as we can see once we notice
the dwarfed Mount Fuji
placed as if the wave is
about to crash down on it
spume dropping like snowflakes
onto the snowclad mountain top.
The mountain once noticed.
is made up of different curves
– those of a volcanic cone
and not these monstrous imaginings
of the Great Wave.

We can be forgiven for not noticing
a whole mountain, not least because
the same limited palette of Prussian,
Cerulean, and Sky Bue with hints of
black are used throughout
with a mushroom coloured sky
louring over the distant Fuji
camouflaging its presence
– hidden in plain sight
– even when framed by the action.

On further examination, we may realise
we have missed two fishing boats
lying flush in the curve of the troughs
between the Great Wave and its siblings
each boat crewed by ten souls
in peril on the deep
– eight clinging for dear life
in the stern of each boat and two
for some unaccountable reason
further for’ard.
Certainly these boats and fishermen
are in peril, as are all seafarers
though I am not
convinced their craft are not
designed to weather
such waves as these
shipwrights know their seas…


The Great Wave of Kanagawa
is an artist’s conceit
a representation of possible peril.
to capture the imagination
of a people who live in permanent peril
– from volcanoes, earthquakes, and
they gave us the very word tsunami
and this representation of
perfectly frozen in place peril
is the epitome of Japanese style
– an image that like few others
is known around the world
printed on bags and worn on T shirts
or simply hung on walls
from Fuji to Finland
from Tokyo to Timbuktu
a universal icon of the raw power
the peril and heedless beauty
of the sea – indeed of all of nature
before which all we
mortal men
may tremble
and do defy
at our peril…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

It is OLN – Open Link Night over at dVerse Poets Pub which is hosted tonight by Mish. As a mini prompt she shared Katsushika Hokusai’s  “Tiger in the Snow” which may have been his final creation. But I had already written an Ekphrastic poem about Hokusai’s most famous image “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” and it is that poem I chose to share tonight. it was written in my writing group where we considered the woodcut…

Le Pho

humanist55
Le Pho (1907 – 2001) Jeune fille au chat blanc, ink and gouache on silk

I see an artist on the cusp of a wave risen up as the artistic traditions of East and West meet headlong in the art of a young Vietnamese artist in the early part of the 20th Century. Painted on silk, an Oriental tradition if ever there was one, that composition of the “Jeune fille” (titled in the language of the French imperialists) displays a synthesis of two quite different traditions of representation, colouration and style. The young woman is represented as almost but not quite making it into three dimensions, the thinnest of outlines on the left-hand side of her face and the strong framing of her hair to the right, work to flatten her face almost in the manner of an icon from the much earlier period of Western art even though the shading of her cheeks lean towards a western three-dimensionality. The table too betrays an Eastern style of perspective, or rather lack of it – showing a near-round disk as if we are looking down on it instead of across it to the girl who leans upon its far side insouciantly smoking a cigarette in a long holder which places the picture squarely in the mid 20’s. The objects on the table are all thus displayed at equal size – a printed book of Chinese pictograms, a traditional ink block and rubbing dish and some artfully displayed blooms in a shallow bowl. The colours are stronger than in traditional Eastern art and yet the face of the young woman evokes both Chinese art and Western paintings of the period with a very direct and frank intimacy – only emphasised by the white cat casually enfolded in the crook of her arm its tail perhaps trapped beneath that arm. This portrait is of a modern young woman, who is at ease with the artist but is somehow caught on the cusp of change both for her and the artist…

a new age beckons
pulling the young artist out
of Eastern art traditions

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics invites us to be inspired by the work of LePho – an early 20th-century Vietnamese artist and to write Ekphrastically to a theme from the following, women, flowers, landscapes or family. I have chosen to write a Haibun for this prompt.