Day 4811: Artist: Yayoi Kusama & Update & Puggles.

"Woman Artist": ink & digital collage.

              

  

Want music?

    Click: Switch, There Will Never Be

 

2GN2S

Yayoi Kusama

She was a little girl in Japan when she first started seeing spots everywhere, hallucinations of flowers and nets and dots that filled every inch of her vision. 

Most people would have hidden these visions away, but Yayoi Kusama turned them into a language that would change the art world forever.

Her polka dots became a way to both capture and survive the chaos inside her mind, transforming fear into something mesmerizing and alive.

When she moved to New York in the 1950s, Kusama arrived with little money and less recognition, but she didn’t let the male-dominated art world swallow her. She painted endlessly, staged body-painting happenings in the streets, and covered entire rooms in mirrors and lights, creating her “infinity rooms” that made visitors feel like they were suspended inside a star-filled universe. These mirrored rooms became portals, dissolving the boundaries between the viewer and the art, allowing people to lose themselves while seeing themselves more clearly.

Throughout her life, Kusama has spoken openly about her struggles with mental health, and she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in the 1970s, where she still lives today. But even there, she has kept creating, transforming pain and fear into vivid sculptures, bright paintings, and those endless fields of dots that feel like they vibrate with the pulse of the universe. Her work has been celebrated in major museums and galleries around the world, and she continues to work every day, often dressed in her signature bright red wig and polka-dot clothes, embodying her art as much as she creates it.

Kusama’s story is a reminder that even the darkest parts of our minds can hold light, and that women can take the spaces where they have felt powerless and turn them into worlds that invite others in. Her life is proof that art is not just something to be looked at, but something that can transform pain into beauty and isolation into connection.

Thank You, Lorraine Merdjan Kushynski 

   

    

   

 

  

 

A -2 minute video, Yayoi Kusama, here

 

  

 

Just because ...

Cattle Egret

 

Sunday's Smiles ...