The Great Wave off Kanagawa may seem simple in design to the untrained eye, but the painting

is one
of the best examples of hoe much control Katsushika Hokusai had gained by this point in his lifetime and
career.

Not only did Katsushika Hokusai create his own process to bring landscapes to life while still exorcising a
great deal of precision, he also wrote about this in his works 'Quick lessons of simplified drawing', in
1812, which were before the painting itself, but something he had always aspired to.

The detail is much more prominent because the only two masses in the painting are the wave itself and
the vanishing point which is beneath the wave.

Although Mount Fuji appears in the background, the perspective and style deliberately makes it look
small in comparison to the wave itself.

This area was well known in Japan to have rough waves, and they were rarely represented in this time
realistically enough to give the viewer an idea of just how brutal they could be.

Many other paintings with similar subjects to this one, that were painted around this time, would focus
on the human tragedy of the boats being engulfed in the wave, but what makes The Great Wave off
Kanagawa so different to paintings Hokusa's contemporaries were doing at the time is that he focused
on the raw power of the elements rather than trying to provoke an emotional reaction from the viewer.

Another striking thing about the painting, is that the colours are fairly basic while still being striking and
unusual. A very small number of colour blocks are used in the piece, in keeping with the simplistic
design, but the style manages to separate them out from each other well enough to make the wave
stand out.