My friend and I visited an exhibition at The British Museum, which is currently showing 103 "lost" drawings by Katsushika Hokusai. This print above hanging at the start of the exhibition, is a portrait of Hokusai from his biography and by Lijima Kyoshin.
When announcing the discovery of the drawings, the British Museum website press release reported that
"Hokusai (1760-1849) is considered by many to be Japan’s greatest artist and has been recognised internationally since the Japonism era of the 1870s, two decades after his death. During his seventy-year career, he produced a considerable oeuvre of some 3,000 colour prints, illustrations for over 200 books, hundreds of drawings and over 1,000 paintings. "
"Over 100 newly-rediscovered drawings by Japanese artist Hokusai have been acquired by the British Museum. Created in 1829 as illustrations for an unpublished book, they came to light in 2019 and have now been purchased by the Museum. The acquisition was made possible thanks to a grant from Art Fund.
The existence of these exquisite small drawings – 103 in total – had been forgotten for the past 70 years. Formerly owned by the collector and Art Nouveau jeweller Henri Vever (1854- 1842), they resurfaced in Paris last year, the same city where they were last publicly recorded: at an auction in 1948. The drawings – which were made for a book called Great Picture Book of Everything – are thought to have been in a private collection in France in the intervening years and unknown to the wider world."
I was interested to learn that the drawings, were made, for an Encyclopedia. Encyclopedias were popular at that time in Japan due to people not being permitted to travel out of the country.
These drawings made for "The Great Book of Everything" only survived due to the book not being published. If it had been the drawings would have been destroyed in the process of making prints.
The Press Release goes on to discuss how these drawings
"are especially significant as they come from a period in the artist’s career where he was previously thought to have created relatively little, due to a succession of personal challenges. Within the previous two years he had suffered the death of his second wife and recovered from a minor stroke. And just months after these pieces were finished, Hokusai pleaded destitution in a letter – in part due to gambling debts incurred by his ne’er-do-well grandson. The reason why these drawings were never published remains unclear, but they mark a turning point in the seventy- year-old artist’s career, demonstrating that he was in fact entering a new burst of creativity that would soon give birth to his famous print series, Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji (c. 1831-1833).
The print below is one of the most famous of Hokusai's works known as "The Great Wave", and part of the Museum's wider collection from this artist who was 72 years old when he designed this print.
I seem to be watching rather a lot of TV documentaries at the moment. One series that I am currently following with tears, gasps of wonder and awe is " katie, My Beautiful Friends" on Channnel 4.
This is the trailer for the series:
Katie Piper is a young woman in her late twenties, who three years ago, worked as a model and was enjoying her young life. This all changed when a man hired someone to throw acid over her. She was burned terribly on her face and body, had damage to her esophagus and was blinded in one eye.
Since the first documentary she made about the initial aftermath of the attack, she has gone on to courageously set up a charity, The Katie Piper Foundation , which has at it's aim to give support to people living with burns and scars.
I've watched all the espisodes, and all have made me sit up and take notice at the courage shown, but the strongest memory I have is of Amit who says, "My Dad used to call me brave boy, but I think it was him that made me brave."
Clink Amit's picture to find out more.
Amit is 21 and about to start University. He is fearful of what people will say when they see him, he wants to go to uni, as this was his Dad's dream for him. His Dad died a few years ago and was Amit's main carer. Amit puts aside his fears and goes to uni. He takes katie's advice to act "as if" he is confident. Soon he is running a fundraising campaign for victims of acid attacks in Islamic countries where many acid attacks take place apparently. Whilst he is going through all of this, he has to come to terms with the prospect of a life saving operation that could leave him paralysed. He is alone when he receives this news from his doctor, his Dad no longer being around to go to hospital appointments with him.
Once again I am speechless at the courage of people like Katie and Amit. I will always be amazed at the human spirit and the ways that we see people continuing their lives whilst dealing with terrible difficulties. Often such courage goes unnoticed, people quietly getting on with things.
We see this in Japan too, at this time. For the past month Japan hasn't been far from our thoughts, as each day we awake and remember what happened. Today, one month on from the Tsumani and Earthquake 14,500 people are still listed as missing and 13,000 people are known to have died. The survivors are still living in shelters and the streets still piled high with rubble. Following the initial shock and attention from news organisations, there has been little about how people are starting to rebuild their lives and the recovery operations, in the mainstream news.
Today Japan is back in the headlines. One man I just heard speaking to the reporter on the news, said that his town had been hit by Tsunamis before and had been rebuilt many times. He stressed that they needed to work hard now to rebuild the town, and referred to the example he would be setting to his son by doing so.
The Japan Red Cross continues to raise money to help survivors and Quake Book is one way that people are fundraising. This is a book that documents people's experience. When you remember that many people will never be found, their bodies never recovered, this seems a fitting memorial to their memories.
Red Nose Day arrived this year on the 18th March, also the day that marked one week on from the earthquake and tsunami in North East Japan. A friend of mine commented that they felt the event should be posponed as people would be giving to organisations, like The Red Cross who are helping with the disaster relief effort. My friend was wrong, at the end of the night £74,360,207 had been raised, which the presenters announced was a record breaking amount.
Whilst watching some of the films made for this year's event, I learned about the Kibera slum area of Nairobi in Kenya. I will never forget one film showing Bernard aged 16, one of many ophaned children all over the world who is caring for his four younger siblings. At 12 Bernard had had to identify his father's body, his father had been killed in riots that occured following the 2007 elections in Nairobi. His mother died a few months later, she was aleady ill with HIV when her husband was killed. Since that time Bernard and his siblings had been living in one dark room next to a toilet used by 50 other families, the toilet sometimes overflowed and ran through their home. Bernard wanted to get an education but often had to miss school due to having to raise money for food to provide a meal a day for his family. The grief this young man was suffering from was very evident in the film, and so was his commitment to his family and his courage. The celebrity taking part in the film and placed with this family, decided to take action straight away to change things for this one boy and his siblings.
I couldn't post the film here but I found another film about the children of Kibera, made by the "send my friend to school" campaign which raises awareness in UK schools and is the UK part of a worldwide movement, the Global Campaign for Education. The campaign lobbies the UK government to deliver on its promise to realise education for all by 2015.
Since 18th March, and as is the case every year that Red Nose Day uses television reports to inform us and to touch our consciences, there are critics who question the motives of the celebrities involved or who tell us that our giving should maybe be a little quieter and more continuous. I'm not going to address these issues here, though there are questions here that I also feel uncomfortable about. What is clear to me is that Red Nose Day, and other such events that were the result of Live Aid, started the very important work of raising awareness of how change could be made, instead of sitting and watching and feeling helpless(as many were doing in the mid-eighties). This article discusses a recent report: The new state of donation: Three decades of household giving to charity, 1978 - 2008, and captures both the concerns and the positives, about high profile events like Red Nose Day very well indeed. It also gives some figures about how the number of households giving to charity has fallen since 1978 and points out how Red Nose Day and Sport Relief are raising awareness amongst a younger generation who are less likely to members of community groups linked to churches, for example.
Whilst I feel that there is more than enough to go round, and that those of us that regularly try to reflect on what and how we do give (and what more we can give), I also feel that there is never enough and that those of us who can, also need to be involved in creating change within our systems. The 2011 "Send My Sister To School" campaign and The Girl Effect are just two ways that our giving and our actions can become more mindful. They also show us, as does Comic Relief, how joining together with others, adding our voice to many, and giving with joy, creates change for all of us around the world.
Folllowing the distaster in Japan there were those who responded by telling us not to give to such a wealthy country. Some excellent advice is given by Good Intentions Are Not Enough regarding this question and how to ensure that if you want to give to Japan, which many of us did when we saw the horror unfolding on March 11th, that you do so in ways which help not hinder.
It can all get so complicated can't it? As I have said earlier there is more than enough, and however we choose to do it, however small our voices, let's just keep on giving. Wherever there is suffering, how can we not? Our money, our time, our attention, our skills, our love.
