About

I suspect that like many people, until recently if I had been asked to pick out a piece of Japanese art, at best I would have been able to recognise the image of ‘The Great Wave off Kanazawa’, but did know anything else about Japanese art. I certainly did not know anything about Woodblock prints.

In 2018, a family holiday took me to Japan, and as a tourist one of the things you want to do is try and see some local art, and I thought that the Great Wave was a picture in the way we in the west consider a picture - there would be the original picture somewhere in a museum that people could visit, much like you can visit the Louvre In Paris and see Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Some half-hearted enquiries didn’t lead anywhere, and but when visiting Nakamise Shopping Street in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, I bought two reproduction prints - The ‘Great Wave’, and ‘Fine Wind, Clear Morning’, tthat I now know to be he first and second prints from the series Thirty-Six views of Mount Fuji, and became the first prints of what has now become The Waveney Collection.

Fast forward to the end of 2021, and scrolling through my Twitter feed, @tanita_takaram often posts pictures from a wide range of artists, and one such tweet showed a Woodblock print by Shoda Koho. For some reason the picture appealed to me, and I thought about getting a copy. I started looking on sites such as Etsy, thinking that someone would make a poster of the print, but I quickly discovered the world of on-line auctions, where you can bid for real Woodblock prints.

When I received my first prints from the auction, I noticed that the prints often had Japanese characters and ‘seals’ around the edges or in the print itself. Searching some more on the internet, and I started to learn more about what these seals represented - the artists, carvers, printers and publishers involved in the production of thee prints, and in an effort to record what I was learning about the history of each print I created this website. I’ve tried to base my research on multiple sources, not a single Youtube video, or Wikipedia page.

If you find the information I’ve recorded here is wrong, or can suggest improvements, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

I hope you enjoy the site, and more importantly, the artwork that it contains.

Paul Gravestock