Grade 4 - 6 students looked at the work of contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kasuma. She is often called the 'Princess of Polka Dots" due to her trademark use of dots!
She is known for her extensive use of polka dots and for her infinity installations. She works in various mediums including painting, sculpture, performance art, and installations in a variety of styles, including Pop art and Minimalism.
Kusama begins to paint as a child, at about the time she experiences hallucinations also of fields of dots. The hallucinations and the theme of dots would continue to appear in her art throughout her life.
She moves to the United States in 1957, where she begins to create what she refers to as “infinity net” paintings, which consist of thousands of tiny marks obsessively repeated across large canvases without considering the borders, as if they continue into infinity. These works explore the physical and psychological boundaries of painting, where the endless repetition of the marks create an almost hypnotic effect for both the viewer and the artist.
She returned to live in Japan in 1973, where she continues to create her art as well as begins to write novels and realize open air sculpture pieces.
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| Yayoi Kusama, Mushrooms, 2003. Students started off by watching a short documentary about Kasuma. Then I showed a slideshow of her many mushroom paintings and we discussed her work. I used THIS tutorial, Art with Trista, for the project inspiration. I demonstrated how to draw a simple infinity net pattern. Students chose a colored paper and drew their infinity net using markers. |
Then they chose other colours of paper and drew mushroom stems and caps.
They cut those out, glued them onto their infinity net background and added polka dots using coloured markers.
Some finished artwork: Grade 4,5,6
2 comments:
These are gorgeous! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks very much Emily :)
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