Hokusai Manga — a sketchbook plate

Studies of gesture. Recurring throughout the Manga are pages that isolate the smallest human actions — hands gripping, pointing, or shaping the air; heads turning; the countless minor postures of sitting, bowing, reaching, and conversing. Hokusai understood that character lives in gesture, and he assembled these fragments almost as a lexicon, a catalog of the body's expressive vocabulary from which any artist might draw. Freed from full scenes or backgrounds, such studies concentrate purely on the eloquence of a wrist or the angle of a spine. They reveal the analytic method beneath the sketchbooks' apparent randomness: break the visible world into its component movements, master each, and reassemble them into living figures. This is instruction of the highest order, teaching not what to draw but how to see. For students copying these pages, they were exercises in the fundamentals; for us, they lay bare the disciplined foundation on which Hokusai's celebrated spontaneity was built.