An Illustrated Dive

La Mer and the great Wave.

How we envision a timeless collaboration between two great artists:
Hokusai and Debussy

Dew and mold,
damp soil,
dust reflected in thin light rays,
my boyfriend playing the piano in his pijamas,
soft skin with a velvety facial hair, like my grand mother's.
Music that emerges behind a water curtain.
All the delicated and romantic stuff I recall.

That's Debussy to me.

Because of that, the first time I heard La Mer

I was shocked

I thought it was so meditative and contemplative

I felt like observing some Turner's marine art

I felt I was hearing the change of the ocean and it's flows

From the outside.
From the shore.

I guess that is what it fulls to appreciate the big wave of Kanagawa. Reading it from the right to the left. The boats look up at the threatening wall of water.
The blank spaces of the foam. A thousand little fingers. Prussian blue and exagerated bidimensional projection of a wave imposible to avoid.

An image in our imagination. The minute after the great wave rises it's already burst.

La mer has three movements.

De l'aube à midi sur la mer - From the evening to noon in the sea

Jeux de vagues - Wave games

Dialogue du vent et de la mer - Dialogue of the wind and the sea

1903 to 1905

Finishing it in the English Channel

Souns of a oar hitting waves

my bowels get frozen

tears in the night

--Matsuo Basho

I cannot think that La Mer was composed in a suit and a hat

A compositionn based in pentatonic scales. A planification dedicated to create a master piece

The sixteen cellos from the beginning seem so natural

After his insistence, art inspired by the Great Wave of Kanagawa was used on the debut album. Debussy and the impressioninst admired Hokusai

Look at this photo of the compositor and Igor Stravinsky next to a copy of the famous wave

"Music is the silence between notes"

The Great Wave of Kanagawa is that minute of silence

La Mer allows us to imagine a youg Debussy and a already old Hokusai seated in front of the sea. Waiting for the big waves

The rough sea

Stretching above Sado Island

The Milky way

--Matsuo Basho

"I have always held a passionate love for her, the sea ..."

"You perhaps do not know I was destined for the life of a sailor and that it was only by chance that I was led away from it. But I still have a great passion for the sea"

Debussy was characterized by the use of musical color as a goal in itself. Afterall, maybe the prussian blue used by Hokusai was a wink that waited years to reach the compositor

"If you stand by the sea and watch how wave upon wave rises and falls, one wave merging into the next, one wave becoming another, you will appreciate that this entire world is also just that. Becoming and becoming"

--Buddhist reflections on death, VF Gunaratna