We spent last winter vacation in Washington, DC. There, Neval and I took the kids to the National Museum of Asian Art to see the exhibit “Hokusai: Mad About Painting.”

The Japanese artist Katsushita Hokusai is most famous for his wood block print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, or simply The Great Wave.

A key theme of the exhibit was that Hokusai’s best work was created late in his life. The Great Wave is part of a series of prints called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which Hokusai completed in his early seventies.

Another incredible work that Hokusai completed late in life, as he approached 80, was his depiction of the Thunder God of Raijin

The color and mood is striking, even more so seeing the much larger actual print. But what I really loved—what the kids enjoyed, too—was the playfulness in the picture.

Zooming in:

The facial expression is hard to pin down. Is the thunder god old and tired? Is he an unwilling servant? Is he someone that wants to have fun and be pleasant but is forced to be imposing and fear-inducing? All of the above?

I was struck by how the painting changed as you looked at it. I was surprised by its impact, both at the time and as I thought about it later. The painting is dark, ominous, funny, and sad. But not at the same time initially. The emotions surface at different times at first viewing. And then once you see them, the effect is a bit like one of those optical illusions, where once you see both illusions, your brain starts to switch between them. The painting would cycle between the emotions in different ways, and you’d have to consciously try to focus on one and minimize the other.

I wondered if everyone experienced the same emotions and in the same order on first viewing. (We found that we did.) I wondered how much of that Hokusai anticipated, whether that was his goal. I wondered how the painting revealed itself to Hokusai over time. Did he aim to paint what we saw at the outset? Or, did he start off aiming to paint a simpler, fiercer thunder god and then later—as he reflected on the thunder god, getting to know him in the process of painting him—found himself drawing the expression that he did?

We had a lot of fun exploring this painting and talking about it for a while. In fact, we spent a good chunk of our entire time at the museum at this painting.

I walked away with a deep appreciation of and respect for Hokusai’s craft—the numerous layers in his paintings, his use of space and just a few rich colors to create a mood, and how he mixed seriousness and playfulness.