Hokusai ‘Great Wave’

A mural by artist Dominic Swords created in 1997 on an end wall in Camberwell and based on the 'Great Wave' by Japanese artist Hokusai.

STORY

In 1997, Dominic Swords, wanting to shake-up his life, went on a personal development course. One part of it required him to lead a community project. "People were abseiling down buildings to raise money for charity. I'm not the sort of person who does that one bit," he says.

He wasn't an artist, but he always liked the idea of painting a mural. "I remember going past them with my parents, looking up and just thinking they were the coolest things ever." He owned a house with a wall big enough to paint one on, so he decided that would be his project. "That was the easy bit," he says. Deciding what to paint was harder.

One night, he discussed options with a friend. He had decided it had to be something natural - murals of people "always look rubbish", he says - and had been thinking about a tree, swaying in the wind. But the friend said, "What about a wave?" And then both had the same thought: "How about that Japanese one?"

For 20 years now, Swords' house in Camberwell, south London, has had a copy of Hokusai's Great Wave (or Under the Wave off Kanagawa, to give it its actual title) painted across its back. Just as in Hokusai's original - which master cutters carved into multiple blocks of wood, so it could be printed again and again - the wave is cresting, dozens of foam fingers stretching out from it. But on the house it looks as if it's about to break into the alley below, and drench anyone passing by, rather than drench the sailors Hokusai painted in three wooden boats.

Christine Guth, author of Hokusai's Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon, says its initial success was partly down to the use of the intense Prussian blue ink that was then new to Japan - "a promotional device" which was probably the idea of Hokusai's publisher. Somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 impressions of the work were made from the original woodblocks and sold in Hokusai's lifetime in Japan, she says, making it "a considerable success". But it took off globally for a whole host of reasons, she argues, including the fact that the picture can hold whatever meaning you want it to.

"It's about movement, creation and destruction," she says. "It can be threatening, it can be about determination."

It can even be humorous, Guth says.

"When I first saw Dominic's mural, I started laughing because the wave seems to be about to pour down on people who're going to walk through that alley."

Before starting his painting, Swords went into a nearby mechanic's workshop to check no-one there had any objection.

The garage was owned by a "very truculent Greek", a chain-smoker never without a greasy cap, he says. "My greatest fear was people would say it was an eyesore or dismiss it as an art school project."

But when Swords said he was going to paint a mural, the man simply asked, "Which image?" Dominic reached into a shopping bag to pull out a book on Hokusai, but before it was half way out, the mechanic went. "Oh, Hokusai! The Great Wave? I've etched that in glass."

The mechanic turned out to be much more of an artist than Swords. He provided advice on how to paint the mural, even lending Swords a projector so he could take the carved glass and beam the image on to the wall.

One night, Swords says, "after the pubs closed, we projected the Wave up there, and, half-cut, scrambled around on the scaffold, with pots of black paint, and did the outline. It looked amazing just like that."

But 15 years later, a local ne'er-do-well almost blasted the mural to kingdom come. In April 2012, Miguel Carmona Gutierrez, a 42-year-old from Seville, was busy stirring chemicals to make crystal meth in a flat underneath the painting, when something went wrong. The explosion that followed was so loud, armed police quickly arrived fearing a terrorist attack. Gutierrez ran from the remains of building, his clothes on fire, and had to be put out by a local who grabbed a fire extinguisher from his girlfriend's hair salon. It took five fire engines three hours to tackle the blaze.

A third of the mural was burnt off, the rest damaged by smoke. But within weeks people were working together to get it back. That October, local community groups and the London Mural Preservation Society put out a call for volunteers to help repaint it, and even managed to get Dulux to donate the paint.

Swords, suggested including "the element of fire" in the new painting, to acknowledge the explosion.

When the new mural took shape the following February it included an exploding Mount Fuji - a reference not only to the fire but also to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.