A
celebrated Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, has lived voluntarily in a
psychiatric hospital since 1977. With an
international following, Kusama was born in 1929 in the mountain
town of Matsumoto, began painting from hallucinations she experienced as a
young girl. Some of her antiwar sentiments stem from the fact that she lived
through World War II in Japan, going to work at a military factory to sew
parachutes when she was just 13 years old. “Since I was 10 years old I have
been painting every day,” she said. “And even now there is not a day that I do
not paint.” She added, “I still see polka dots everywhere.”
As
Kusama explains, "one day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the
tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the
ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body, and
the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the
infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to
nothingness."
How
to paint like Kusama
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