With the desire to escape the misery of her everyday life style, Yayoi Kusama releases her feelings through her outstanding works of art. Whether you are looking at her canvasses, walking through her installations or witnessing a happening performance, Kusama’s work leads any viewer to step into a world that is more than just an exhibition, but is a world and life of hallucinations. Yayoi Kusama’s unique style of art has made her a noteworthy artist in contemporary art today. With a concentration on polka dots, or how the artist would call “infinity nets”, Yayoi Kusama reveals her hallucinations of life through her massive amount of pattern. With her obsessive nature and background of personal traumas, Yayoi Kusama aims to eliminate the world in her form of art. This research paper will explore how the thoughts in her mind have led her to create the fascinating, polka dot themed, art work she is well known for.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Yayoi Kusama was a self-taught artist. Today, Yayoi Kusama is without a doubt the most well-known Japanese artist. In an interview with Akira Tatehata, Kusama was told that she had been referred as a “surrealist-pop” artist. However, Kusama believes that she has nothing to do or relate to with surrealism. Her work revolves around the horrific memories and traumas she lived during her home life in Japan. She grew up being neglected and abused. The scars her parents left her with were enough to make an impact in her life. It was in November of 1957 when Kusama finally made one of the biggest decisions in her life. With the help of American artist, Georgia O’ Keefe, Kusama traveled to America and began to make her mark in art history.
Obsession Monochrome (1959) was the first of many s...
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...le genetilia and male genitals. This all led to Yayoi Kusama to have a hatred towards sex.
The hallucinations that inspire Yayoi Kusama’s art continue even until today. However, she has isolated herself from the art world. In her interview with Udo Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama continues to live, by choice, in a psychiatric hospital in Japan. Here, she does work on her own and by herself. She continues to work and give meaning to all the hallucinations she has had and still has in her life. She explains in her autobiography that she is no longer afraid of death. Kusama believes it is simply stepping into another room that is another stage of life. With all of her life experiences, Yayoi Kusama can look back and see that she is proud of all that she did. Yayoi Kusama has a different and unique look through life now and she will continue to live with no regrets.
Born in 1951 in Osaka, the third largest city in Japan, Yasumasa Morimura is a Japanese artist who has become well-known for his captivating and elaborate portraits which emulate iconic art historical images as well as aspects of mass media and popular Western culture. He is able to realistically slide into the roles of art historical icons such as the Mona Lisa as well as prominent actresses such as Marilyn Monroe through extensive preparation. A majority of his portraits deal with issues such as cultural and sexual appropriation as well as the multifaceted, complicated relationship between Japan and the West. Costumes, makeup, props, and digital manipulation are used to produce provocative, large-scale self-portraits which challenge these
Ester Hernandez is a Chicana artist, best known for her works of Chicana women. Ester’s goal is to recreate women’s lives to produce positive images of women’s lifestyle and to create icons. Her piece, Frida y Yo, contains the iconic painter Frida Kahlo. Frida, after being in multiple accidents causing long-term pain and suffering, began painting, mostly self-portraits, to portray her reality and glorify the pain. Similar to how Hernandez's goals are a juxtaposition to Frida’s artwork, the art piece Frida y Yo creates a juxtaposition between life and suffering and death and fortune.
The American artist Fred Tomaselli arranges pills, leaves, insects and cutouts of animals and body parts to create his pieces of art. His incorporation of items are arranged to suggest a level of perception along with a heightened visual experience. This gives me, the viewer, a sense of Energy. The perception of color that Fred uses gives a gravitating feel. If you take a look at the heart of this piece you can instantly visualize the different items Fred incorporates into the piece.
With an admiration for the unconventional, I am moved by Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (number 30). If I could see any art piece in person, this would be my choice. I believe that Pollock’s radical painting style and the way in which he lay the canvas flat on the floor to work, gives this piece a deepened perspective. There is a visible control in the chaos to which Pollock has said "I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident." Seeing this piece in person would awaken my unconsciousness, and convey the feeling of spontaneity that I wish society will still embrace.
Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo had an immense amount of impact on the world of art. Warhol has always explored the rooted connection between celebrity culture and artistic expression, which left him with a lasting legacy that has marked him for one of the most famous artists to have existed. The population was fascinated by Warhol’s ability to blur the lines between fine art and innovative design, providing him a large following and work that will be remembered for decades. Kahlo too is a name that is not likely to be forgotten. Her work is recognizable on a global level and her works are loved by many people. The deep admiration her followers have given her, and the amount of modern artists that she has influenced, creates an immortalization
Frida Kahlo is known for the most influential Latin American female artist. She is also known as a rebellious feminist. Kahlo was inspired to paint after her near-death bus incident when she was 17. After this horrendous incident that scarred her for life, she went under 35 different operations. These operations caused her extreme pain and she was no longer able to have kids. Kahlo’s art includes self portraits of her emotions, pain, and representations of her life. Frida Kahlo was an original individual, not only in her artwork but also in her
This act of creativity involves effort, toil, inspiration, failure, and is accompanied by the scorn and criticism of others who do not understand, as Arthur Koestler puts, the bisociative connection the artist makes in his inspirati...
Vivid details in the animals and the bare woman’s body are powerful and the realistic features mixed in with the surreal qualities make the experience of viewing the artwork inviting and quite entertaining.
In Yaa Gyasi’s composite novel Homegoing, themes of gender, race, and colonization are tackled through Gyasi’s ‘broken’ novel structure, in which she portrays overlapping generational stories, rather than a single, unified narrative. Gyasi prefers to tell the stories that popular American history has erased and ignored over the centuries, and attempts to dig into themes that other neo-slave narratives have not yet reached. One such theme is that of the queer experience in nineteenth-century colonized Africa. In popular American culture, historical narratives from ‘the colonized’ tend to focus on the extreme hardships (such as violence, injustice, and bondage), rather than the seemingly less drastic burden of sexual confusion on a teenage boy.
Through Frida Kahlo’s extensive self-portrait pieces, audiences are able to view her life in an almost biographical way. Each portrait conveys deep emotion and meaning, and carry a story which Kahlo has experienced. Her self-portraits are very personal, and overall show just how tragic her life had been.
In spite of religion being the ruling subject matter of art for many centuries, magic and mysticism have long been interwoven in a dark curtain that hangs over a large segment of the art world. The whole world is alive and filled with soul, whether light or dark. “Each material form may be thought of as attracting an appropriate soul, as firewood treated with sulphur draws flame.” While there is no historical or scientific evidence for the legitimacy of séances, magic or communication with the deceased, in D.H. Rawcliffe’s book Occult and Supernatural Phenomena, he reminds us of the importance of hallucinations and other fantastical experiences of the subconscious. These often provide strange and impressive experiences, interpreted as supernatural in origin. As we study art, we can only begin to wonder what spirits might have visited the great masters, any hallucinations they might have experienced, and how their paintings were influenced by the dark corridors of their subconscious.
Green 1 Controlled Chaos: The Impact of Surrealism on the Art World The Surrealist movement that began in the 1920’s, was unlike anything the art world had ever seen before. While Surrealist painters borrowed techniques from previous “ism” movements, for example Impressionism and Cubism, the prominent painters of this movement had acquired a new, shocking style all their own. Surrealism, as an art movement, stressed the importance of expanding one’s mind in order to welcome other depictions of ‘reality’. Surrealist artists channelled their subconscious and their works reflected images of total mind liberation. Unlike the art movements before it, Surrealism came the closest to truly reflecting the human dreamlike state. While this essay will explore the purpose, techniques and lasting impact of the Surrealist art movement, it should be noted that this movement transcended the boundaries of the image arts world. The influence of Surrealism can be felt in the fields of literature, film, music and philosophy, among others. The Surrealist movement started in 1920’s Europe, with Paris as the unofficial basis for the movement. Surrealism is usually linked with the Dada movement. Dadaism attacked the conventional forms of aesthetics and it stressed how absurd and unpredictable the process of artistic creation was. They created pieces of ‘non-art’ to show, out of protest, how meaningless European culture had become (de la Croix 705). The Dada movement was declared dead around 1922 when it had become ‘too organised‘ a movement, but it planted the seeds for Surrealism (de la Croix 706). While the Dada movement provided the basis for Surrealism, Surrealism was lighter and much less violent than its predecessor. Dadaism provided a basis for Su...
Modern art runs a very important role in man’s life throughout history, because it that does not only give us inspiration but also the freedom to express ourselves through the use of different mediums.
Paintings, like many forms of art, are very subjective—what one may find intriguing another may completely disagree. “Art is physical material that affects a physical eye and conscious brain” (Solso, 13). To glance at art, we must go through a process of interpretation in order to understand what it is we are looking at. Solso describes the neurological, perceptual, and cognitive sequence that occurs when we view art, and the often inexpressible effect that a work of art has on us. He shows that there are two aspects to viewing art: nativistic perception—the synchronicity of eye and brain that transforms electromagnetic energy into neuro-chemical codes—which is "hard-wired" into the sensory-cognitive system; and directed perception, which incorporates personal history—the entire set of our expectations and past experiences—and knowledge (Solso, preface)
All throughout time people have used their imaginative minds to express some form of art, whether it be painting, drawing, sculpture, and dance, theatre, music or technology, this has happened all around the world. Furthermore, I think that the youth of the world have the biggest imagination because everything to them is new and they can’t help but imagine “what if” or “how”. Therefor that’s the power of imagination, and preferably for me I use it for art. Art to me is almost like an escape from everything negative in my life. Many say that art is beauty, and we say beauty ...