Dave Bull Carves Hokusai's Picture Book of Everything | Curator's Corner S8 Ep6

If you make woodblock prints for a living, you know the name Hokusai, and if you’re a woodblock carver and you hear about original drawings from Hokusai that have never been carved into prints you would most likely do a little happy dance.

Which is exactly what David Bull did when he found out about the collection of original Hokusai drawings known as the ‘Picture Book of Everything’, recently acquired by the British Museum.

Well, we don’t know if he did a little dance, perhaps just in his head maybe? Anyway… he was very excited. So excited in fact that he immediately contacted curators at the Museum to see if they would be interested in a collaborative project to turn some of these original Edo era designs into woodblock prints.

We visited David’s workshop in Asakusa, Tokyo to find out how one would approach such an endeavor.

00:15 Welcome to Tokyo
00:36 Dave reads his morning paper
01:08 The idea takes shape
01:39 What does the process involve?
02:44 Different designs in the collection
03:55 Working from original drawings
06:42 Different carvers different cuts
07:16 The tools of the trade

You can explore any and all of the British Museum's Hokusai prints on the Museum website here: britishmuseum.org/collection

If you'd like to buy Tim Clark's book on the drawings, you can get it here: https://bit.ly/3CiiKBj

You can find out more about Dave's woodblock shop, Mokuhankan here: https://mokuhankan.com

This film was made possible with the support of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.