April 2026– date –

Digital print quality varies enormously — from excellent museum-scan restorations to pixelated stretched files. What resolution actually means, what source quality matters, and how to buy what looks good on your wall.

The Great Wave is on mugs, phone cases, tattoos, and the wave emoji. How a 19th-century Edo print became the most reproduced artwork in human history — and what that ubiquity means.

Japanese lacquerware and ukiyo-e prints share compositional conventions, seasonal symbolism, and design vocabulary. They developed within the same visual culture — and understanding one enriches the other.

Ukiyo began as a Buddhist term for suffering and was deliberately inverted into a philosophy of pleasure. Understanding this semantic shift changes what you understand ukiyo-e to be.

Everyone knows Hokusai's waves. Far fewer know his bird and flower prints — kachō-ga that show a different kind of attention: intimate, observational, among the finest in the genre's history.

The Great Wave's iconic blue was a European synthetic pigment that arrived in Japan around 1820. A material history of ukiyo-e color — what changed, what faded, and what it means for looking at prints.

Shinto's understanding of nature as sacred — the kami in mountains, rivers, and ancient trees — shaped Japanese visual culture at its deepest level. Understanding Shinto changes how you see Hokusai.

Surimono were privately commissioned prints with no commercial cost ceiling — metallic pigments, blind embossing, extraordinary fine carving. The luxury tier of ukiyo-e that most people have never seen.

The Fuji Five Lakes — Kawaguchiko, Yamanakako, Saiko, Shojiko, Motosuko — gave Hokusai his most compositionally ambitious Fuji images. A guide to the sacred geography at the mountain's base.

Japanese landscape painting spans a thousand years — from Chinese-influenced ink scrolls through the Kanō school's gold-leaf screens to Hokusai's revolutionary ukiyo-e landscapes. A complete visual history.