Yayoi Kusama

Tis the season to be dotty . . .

If you've never read the story of Yayoi Kusama and her dots, you are in for a very nice surprise. There are quite a few artists who have dabbled in pointillism for a while, either realistically or abstractly and it's usually an experiment to help them break their paintings down into basic elements; a tool to pick their artistic brains and come up with some solutions. But Yayoi really took it to another level and really didn't worry about it being called dots because they were, well, dots. At first some of her work comes off as cute or quirky. It's not until you've seen a lot of her work that you realize just how thoroughly she delved into so many possibilities, both in the exploration and the presentation. It really is quite stunning, as you see piece after piece and notice all the quality effort that went into each one. What an amazing mind. Sometimes I wonder if artists are just another category of scientists.

Definitely worth your while to search out some reading material on her and there's a wonderful amount of images of her work on the web.

A good start is this page at Artnet where they have 114 images, list of her galleries, reviews and magazine articles.

top image from Mocoloco

bottom image from Fadwebsite