Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeeZ | Hacker News Reader

You may want to hit up David Bull, he's done a bit of research on the various versions of the great wave, while making his own

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK-Wicsj5rAasS2g7e-Z9eFUd...

View on HN

With regards to buying a print of the Great Wave from David Bulls work shop (which I'd personally consider as original as any other print), I got this e-mail from the Mokuhan team back in January:

> The printing is going very slowly - we limit each run to a maximum of 60 sheets, in order not to overly wear out the key block. And we cannot turn our top printers (the ones working on this project) into 'Zombie Great Wave Printing Machines'. They take turns working on this one, mixed in with plenty of work on subscription prints and other designs, so we end up with a new batch of prints every 7~8 weeks or so.

> [...] At present this email address is in position [ 2,017 ] from the top of the list

I signed up, gosh, feels like years ago.

Woah, I had no idea of the queue. I'll settle for my current mass-produced print.

I got one years ago, and was a little bit underwhelmed but I'm not sure why. I originally thought the colour of the boats was off, but looking online it seems that some people render them in a richer red/brown than they actually are.

My copy actually is just lying in a cupboard in the original packaging. I never got around to actually displaying it!

Beware the import duty from Japan too!

The whole wood-block printing process is amazing, I just wish he'd branch out from copying Japanese stuff. Hardly any of his other works float my boat.

The British Museum have published some great info on the variations. It's best as this video https://youtu.be/U_025NB8alw or the PDF research paper equivalent.

My personal favourite impression is the one at Claude Monet's house in Giverny, France. I'm yet to see it in person, but they have a high resolution photo online. In this one the boats are muted and Fuji looks like a small wave. Of course, originally the colours may have been wildly different! https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/115623713193900851...

That video is excellent! Thanks for sharing

I saw this one a few weeks ago. It's sad that it's displayed with a highly reflective glass cover in a very bright room. It's impossible to take in the whole thing at once.

> My copy actually is just lying in a cupboard in the original packaging. I never got around to actually displaying it!

Interested in finding it a new home?

I don't understand this rotating crafter thing. Wouldn't you want your crafters to be experts in their craft? How is rotating them making them better at this?

Printmaking requires care and attention, and doesn't pay great. It falls squarely in the 'art career' category, where people choose it for reasons other than comp. If you have to print the same image every day, potentially indefinitely, the type of person who chose to be a printmaker is going to get sick of it.

Aah, its a supply side thing. That actually makes sense, I would leave a job too if all I did was write the same html page all day.

(Don't know if that is a fair analogy, maybe a better one exists on sysadmin side?)

Because programming is meta-applicable, competent practitioners will respond to being given the same task over and over by automating it, which isn't a thing if the whole point of what you do is that a human did it manually.

Princess Nell's observation about the nature of the Dovetail community in the novel Diamond Age applies: this is all very well, but it makes no actual sense without the context of the rest of society, on its own this practice is not tenable.

It would seem nobody wants to be good at only printing one picture.

I guess they only make 400/year so I guess it will take many years to get to the top of the list.

One interesting detail about the Great Wave that came up in those videos is that apparently none of the known Edo-era prints in existence is (believed to be) an actual original. All of them show one or more signs of being a copy, or a copy-of-a-copy.

Copyright did not exist in Japan at the time, so copying of popular woodblock prints happened a lot. And each time, it had to be traced, carved and printed by hand.

Dave Bull's work is nothing short of amazing. He looked at multiple prints in detail, compared them against each other and knowing the nature of copying artefacts, he attempted to discern the original strokes and cuts as much as possible.

The original was destroyed as it was pasted to the block for the carver to cut its image. Then many impressions are printed with the blocks. The blocks wear and are damaged over time so new parts of blocks or whole new blocks are swapped out. Eventually, somebody creates a whole new set of blocks, and so on.

Wow. What an amazing process and how delicate. Thanks for the playlist.

I have one, it's a beautiful work of art.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com