Thunderous Waters

Ascribe to the LORD the glory of his name; worship the LORD in holy array. The voice of the LORD is upon the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, upon many waters. (Psalm 29: 2–3) From 1831–32, painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai produced studies of eight waterfalls in the Japanese provinces. Like his earlier fifteen studies of Mount Fuji, these were also intended to be collected as a set. Matthi Forrer points out the ‘combination of light and strong, intense blues (Prussian Blue had recently become available), mostly contrasted with whites’ in Hokusai’s treatments of the falls themselves, with their surroundings depicted in naturalistic earth colours (Forrer 2008: 16). Where the Fuji prints emphasized the distinctive shape of the mountain, the dominant feature in these prints is falling water. In this print of Kirifuri Waterfall, on the route to the Tokugawa mausoleum at Nikkō, north of Tokyo, Hokusai brings together the drama of the vertical drop with an extraordinary characterization of the waterfall itself—a knotty primeval ‘root system’ of thick, ropey, branching streams, descending into a pool that seems almost to boil at the impact of the water. Human figures provide a sense of scale here. Hokusai’s figures are, like us, observers: respectful and awestruck. Three stand at the foot of the falls, gazing up; two stand further up the slope watching the downward rush of the water. The heads of the lower figures are raised in an attitude suggestive of wonder, admiration, and even worship. Two stand alertly upright, while the third adopts a lower, yet still attentive posture. For the external viewer, the scene does not depict any actual destructive event. Yet it invites us to imagine the water’s power to destroy simply by being itself, as it cleaves its way through rocks and vegetation. The artist has styled the water as a prehistoric creature, whose vast talons confront us in the foreground. What a visual representation cannot reproduce, though, is sound. The roar of the water rushing down the mountainside into the pool is a task for the imagination, and the inner ear might hear in it the voice which the psalmist places both ‘over the waters’, and yet somehow speaking through them (Psalm 29: 3–4). References Forrer, Matthi. 2008. Hokusai: Mountains and Water, Flowers and Birds (Munich, London & New York: Prestel)