Flowers of Yayoi
Updated: Feb 9, 2021
Painting inspired by Yayoi polka dots
Artist: Yayoi Kusama
Genre: Still life
Medium: Oil paint
Subject: Flower
Created: 1983
Periods: Pop art / Minimalism
Kusama spent her childhood surrounded by her family’s seed harvesting grounds.
As a little girl, she often went out into the flower fields with her sketchbooks, developing her passion for drawing
For the artist, plants have been both beloved subjects and frightening figures, instilling fear through hallucinations and reflecting her state of mind.
Yayoi Kusama began to paint using polka dots and nets as motifs at around age ten, and created fantastic paintings in watercolors, pastels and oils.
Avant-garde artist and novelist, Yayoi Kusama from a young age, experienced visual and auditory hallucinations, and began creating net and polka-dot pattern pictures. Those hallucinations and the theme of dots would continue to inform her art throughout her career.