Sage Lewis Facebook Archive: Post 110

A major reason we are in Boston right now is to catch the Hokusai exhibit before it closes at the Boston Fine Arts Museum. My son, Indiana (pictured here with his girlfriend, Emily) are standing in front of Hokusai’s most famous piece. He is the one who drove this trip. He’s a big Hokusai fan. I am obsessed with this particular painting. It represents the world to me. It’s a story of some humans clinging for dear life as the most ominous and terrifying wave is bearing down on them. It looks hopeless. Yet Mount Fugi is a small, yet very clear representation of hope in the background. In my painting I don’t currently have a symbol of hope. I think compassion and hope and love are not what humanity represents. Collectively we are a careless and cruel swarm of mindless locusts. But Hokusai says there is hope. And so I take him as a prophet. Maybe there is hope even though I have ventured deep into the depths of human truth and I can see no hope whatsoever in the collective human consciousness.