Hokusai is considered one of the greatest masters in the history of art. Even if you do not know his name, you have seen a reproduction or a take on his Great Wave off Kanagawa.

In his seventies, shortly after making the Great Wave off Kanagawa, he wrote:

“From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account.

At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants.

And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine.

When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.”

He continued to paint until his death, at age 88, at which point he is rumored to have said:

“If only Heaven will give me just another ten years … Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter”