It doesn’t seem right to bring you flower art every month without turning at some point to Yayoi Kusama.  This Japanese contemporary artist has often used flowers in her installations, sculpture and paintings.  Artists who use this subject are generally attracted by their beauty and colour, but floral art comes in genres to suit every gardener’s taste.  However, Kusama’s works are definitely flower art with a modern twist.

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 and moved to the US in the late 1950s to join the exciting New York art scene.  She formed a big part of the 1960s scene there, before returning to Japan in the 1970s suffering from mental health problems.  Her mental health had always been problematic, probably due to her difficult childhood.  When she returned from the US to Japan she checked herself into a mental hospital and has lived there voluntarily ever since.  Her art studio is just down the road from the hospital.

Kusama talks openly about her mental health and the impact it has on her art.  She also recognises the impact her art has had on her health.  She has suffered from hallucinations since childhood, imagining herself being swallowed up in red dots.  As a result she often uses polka dots as a motif in her sculptures and paintings.  Flowers also form an important part of her work, and sometimes she combines flowers and dots in the same works.  This painting is one of those.  Kusama painted it in 1989 and titled it ‘Ready to Blossom in the Morning’.

We hope all you garden-lovers are enjoying the flower art we share with you.  If you’d like to know more about this artist, click to visit the Yayoi Kusama Wikipedia page