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  From :- BBC World News   By :-  Pauline McLean   -  Scotland arts correspondent  Edited by:-  Amal Udawatta   Mihaela Bodlovic Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai has inspired Scottish Opera's latest work Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created more than 30,000 artworks during an extraordinary nine-decade career. One image in particular from two centuries ago - the picture The Great Wave off Kanagawa - has inspired countless works ranging from animations to T-shirts. The latest example of this is a new work for Scottish Opera by Japanese composer Dai Fujikura and Scottish librettist Harry Ross. The pair had collaborated on three operas together when Dai and his family were invited to an exhibition of Hokusai's work in London in 2017. "We didn't know anything about Hokusai," says Dai, who was born in Osaka but moved to London when he was 15. "We'd seen that picture, the image of The Great Wave, but that was it. "So we went and we were real...

    From - BBC World News By - Nicholas Barber Edit by - Amal Udawatta (Image credit: The Kinkade Family Foundation) Beloved by many, despised by others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks. Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than  $100m a year . And yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or obscene, but because, well, he specialised in quaint pictures of thatched-roof rural cottages nestling in leafy groves. "Thomas Kinkade's style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History of Art, tells the BBC....