"In 1806, Shogun Iyenari organized a competition between {Japanese artist} Hokusai and Shazanro Buncho, a celebrated representative of the chinese school. Hokusai won general admiration and the favor of the shogun in the following manner. First he unrolled on the ground a long roll of paper and painted it with big blue loops. Then he took a cock, dipped its feet in red paint and made it walk across the paper. His audience at once recognized a river studded with red maple leaves in autumn. In his text Eloge de La Main, Henri Focillon returns to this story in order to remind the reader that the cock was, for Hokusai, nothing more than a new kind of painting tool... like a special kind of brush whose shape and way of moving (largely unpredictable) allowed him to achieve exactly the effect he was looking for."
-Desmond Morris, 1997
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