The wave behind Wavedoro
Where our art comes from, and who to thank.
Around 1830–32, the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, then in his seventies, carved and printed Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave. It's a woodblock print in ink and color on paper, from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
The wave stays enormous. The rowers keep rowing anyway.
Look closely and the wave isn't the subject. Three boats of rowers sit beneath it, heads down, oars in the water. Mount Fuji stays small and still in the distance. That's the whole idea of a focus session: the distraction looks huge, and you just keep rowing toward your mark.
Hokusai's print is in the public domain. The Metropolitan Museum of Art shares its copy as an Open Access image, free for anyone to use and adapt, commercially or not.
Every picture in Wavedoro is our own adaptation of that public-domain original. We redrew the sea and Fuji, then added the pieces a voyage needs: the honey-coloured boat and its crew, moving oars, Hokusai-style plovers, the harbor shore and the parchment-and-indigo colours.
Credit where it's due: visuals inspired by Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa. You can see the original at The Met: metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/36491.
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