Yayoi!

There are two or three other women artists to draw (or draw like) this week before getting to this one, but I took one look and couldn't resist.

Her name is Yayoi Kusama, and she is a contemporary artist who is famous for working in a variety of media, including sculpture, film, installation, and painting. She is known for using a wealth of repetitive pattern, and to some she is the "Princess of Polka Dots." She had a troubled childhood, and owes some of her avant garde art visions to literal hallucinations, in which she saw "infinity nets," a combination of lines and dots and flowers.

She was a major influence on the avant garde art scene of 1960s New York, but the lack of recognition for her work (combined with the success of male artists who mimicked her) led to suicide attempts. In 1977, having returned to Japan in ill health, she checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill, where she lives to this day. She has a studio a short distance from the hospital, where she continues her work into her ninth decade.

Her exhibit "All the Eternal Love I Have for Pumpkins" inspired me to paint her submerged in an orange background with vaguely pumpkin-shaped stenciling in the background. I turned her usual wig from red to orange, and added in some polka dots reminiscent of her work. During her childhood her family apparently relied on the pumpkins they grew in their nursery for food, and they represented comfort and security to the artist. She lauded them for "solid spiritual balance."

The artist demonstrating for this day in the challenge chose to paint a young woman with brown hair (but with Yayoi's haircut), and then decorate the background with dots, circles, and flowers; it was a good painting, but when you have THIS face to paint instead, why substitute?

"Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin"—stencils and gesso, pencil, Daler Rowney inks, watercolors, Micron pen, white gel pen, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 8x8 inches.