Yayoi Kusama Pumpkins

Yayoi Kusama (born 22 March 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility which she leaves daily to walk to her nearby studio to work. 

Grade 4-6 students watched a video about Kasuma's life. Then they looked at photos of her work, including her pumpkins and mushrooms. 

Yayoi Kusama often features kabocha, or pumpkin, in her work. Since 1946 Kusama’s pumpkins have taken many forms, colours and shapes, but they are always covered in the artist’s signature polka dot pattern.

Although she makes lots of different types of art – paintings, sculptures, performances and installations – she has become known for the one thing they have in common, DOTS! Yayoi Kusama tells the story of how when she was a little girl she had a hallucination that freaked her out. She was in a field of flowers when they all started talking to her! The heads of flowers were like dots that went on as far as she could see, and she felt as if she was disappearing or as she calls it ‘self-obliterating’ – into this field of endless dots. This weird experience influenced most of her later work. By adding all-over marks and dots to her paintings, drawings, objects and clothes she feels as if she is making them (and herself) melt into, and become part of, the bigger universe. 

Students started off by drawing a 3D pumpkin on regular white paper.

Then they outlined it in sharpie and added dots of different sizes in vertical lines down the pumpkin.

Then we did the tin foil bingo dauber transfer technique which I saw on an Instagram reel.

Cut tin foil the same size as the paper. Students use bingo daubers to create a pattern on the tin foil.

Then spray the tin foil with water and place the pumpkin drawing face down. Rub and peel off to reveal the colorful transfer!

Finished Grade 4-6 artworks!

 

Kasuma Pumpkin Prints

For this Halloween themed project, Grade 4-6 students looked at the work of the "Princess of Polka Dots", Yayoi Kasuma. She lives and works in Japan.

For Yayoi Kusama, pumpkins have been a lifelong source of fascination. She was first drawn to them in childhood, citing their “generous unpretentiousness” and “spiritual balance,” and has explored them continually in her painting, sculpture, installation art, and poetry. They first appeared in her work in the 1940s and have been the subject of some of the most important works of her career. Today, polka-dotted pumpkins are synonymous with the artist and her idiosyncratic style.

Students started off by drawing a realistic pumpkin with segments. 

Then outline it in Sharpie and create the Kasuma dot pattern within each segment. 

Start large, then medium, then small.

Once it's all dotted in, cut a sheet of tin foil the same size as the paper.

Using bingo daubers, draw a pattern all over the tin foil. Spray it with a water bottle to wet the whole sheet of foil.  Then press the pumpkin drawing face down onto the wet tin foil. Rib the back gently and them lift to reveal the colourful print!

Some completed Grade 4,5,6 artwork!

 

Yayoi Kasuma Inspired Mushrooms Art Project

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.

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