So, I was at the Hokusai exhibition in the British museum and I found out a couple of things I never did know about him. The first was that his name wasn't Hokusai. In fact he had loads of names during his very long artistic career, hokusai was just one of them, but the one the world came to know him by. Hokusai means something like 'north studio' - I was quite taken by that. The second thing I found out was that he coined the word 'manga' which to him meant 'random drawings' - something quite different to its modern meaning in the world of comics. I was quite taken by that too. I heard once that he was asked when he was world famous and very old if he had any ambitions left and he said something like "I would like to get the line just right, just once" - I don't know if that's true or not, but it has always struck me as a very zen thing to say, so I hope it is (or was). All these things mixing in my head on the way home from the exhibition led to me drawing the first north-studio zen manga strip when I got back to my iPad that night. I've drawn a few more since and may Draw even more; who knows? Not me, that's for sure... Steve bee August 2017
1 Publizr