Clouds / Blue / Orange

What I was going to blip yesterday, before I saw Grenfell Tower, was our visit to the Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum. 
 
A couple of weeks ago I watched an illuminating BBC documentary, Hokusai: Old Man Crazy to Paint', in which, as a result of a blip conversation with Sara that evening about abstract images, I was struck by two things David Hockney said about him:

'Hokusai saw that on a flat surface everything was an abstraction, everything.'

Then, later,

'In his 80s he began to reach beyond the surface of things to the life of things.'
 
The painting that illustrated this last comment was this which had me completely transfixed, both in the documentary and standing in front of it, but in fact I thought 'the life of things' was in almost all his prints and paintings. Though parts (often Mount Fuji, water or clouds) were abstract, he populated his pictures with fabulously alive people. Among many others, I loved these land surveyors.

In inadequate homage to Hokusai, my photo combines clouds, blue and orange (and perhaps an abstract mountain), though nothing like as beautifully as he uses them.


Extra is me messing with the much-blipped roof of the Great Court.