Dive (The Great Wave)

This painting is a homage: (1) to the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai who created the iconic image "The Great Wave" from his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji; and (2) to the song Dive by Nirvana.  Both inspirations lent their names to the title of this painting.

The Ukiyo-e woodblock print from about 1830 is one of the most reproduced artworks in the world. In the Artist's opinion, it is one of a select few perfect compositions that have ever been created in human history.

Hokusai is alleged to have said, just before his death, that: At the age of five years I had the habit of sketching things. At the age of fifty I had produced a large number of pictures, but for all that, none of them had any merit until the age of seventy. At seventy-three finally I learned something about the true nature of things, birds, animals, insects, fish, the grasses and the trees. So at the age of eighty years I will have made some progress, at ninety I will have penetrated the deepest significance of things, at a hundred I will make real wonders and at a hundred and ten, every point, every line, will have a life of its own.

It’s a matter of experience to make a perfect work of art.  Hokusai was approximately seventy-three years old when he created an opus that is only granted to one's oeuvre by Time. 

Our American culture pedestals vanity and youth and debases age and experience; turning people into horrors of surgical malpractice in the hopes that they, like the ancient Egyptians before them, would carry that vanity into the afterlife.  Of course, their physical selves will eventually be eaten by worms, turn into nothing but dust, or into drops in the waters of creation.

Nothing can be added or taken away from this masterpiece of two-dimensional engineering without compromising its structural integrity.

The image is immediate.  The song, like most Punk music, emerges quickly.  Its just under four minutes long.  Its not a composition by Dvorak or Beethoven, but its short, sweet, and it gets to the point. 

In a world we consider liberated by technology and speed, we are constrained by limited time.  Images are quick; they must be done quickly, and I always I paint as fast as I can.

Like the image, the sound has no error.  It elucidates a single point; the same way that the picture is just about being stranded in the sea.  The tension is so much that you become the sea itself.  You are about to be swallowed up in it.  You and it are one, the same way you were one with water when you were born.

Anand tries to take this approach with his art.  He doesn't believe in mistakes.  Sometimes something just works, and every croak in the voice or strained guitar string contributes to the beauty of the intent behind it.  The feedback gives you feed back.  The image gives flow to another image.

We swim within the waters of creation. In this great immersion, one must not be aquaphobic.  

While making this painting, the Artist absorbed the song's repeated mantra over and over:

Dive, dive, dive, Dive in ME.