Hi, January!

It's always a bit uphill with January. For me, anyway.

But days are getting longer and - as always - I start to feel a bit more energetic and optimistic, after December, which always drains me completely (this blog actually started as a kind of getting-through-December-therapy, or at least as an exercise in doing the things I like doing in December...).
But enough about that. So, onwards and Hey there, 2017.

This is an Instagram post that just really made me smile yesterday, which is why I will let it not illustrate my point in any particular way..... (?) But it does have two of my bigger idols in it, at once (sort of) and it makes me want to go out and see things, in stead of moping about in here, endlessly sorting our sock drawers.

It's Nick Cave, of course, at Mona museum in Tasmania, in the Yayoi Kusama 'Dots Obsession' installation. From @nickcaveofficial

I just couldn't resist it

I promise this will be the last reference to Yayoi Kusama for a veeeery long time. But it's been ages since I made a woven heart for this blog.... So when this image popped into my mind, I had a hard time letting it go. I really tried, cause I think it's a bit silly. And then I thought what the heck, and made it anyway. Silly is fine, actually (check my full list - I have made some very silly ones!)

It's the Tribute to Yayoi Pumpkin Christmas heart! Yay!
And it even comes in seasonal red/white as well.

So why don't you download yourself a dotty heart, and have some fun with that.

Click here for the yellow Yayoi heart  /  and here for the red Yayoi heart

Having a hard time weaving paper hearts? Use my very simple tutorial, or try to find a video, I am sure there are countless.

Pumpkins. Or Yayoi Kusama by numbers.

Okay, I write a lot about Yayoi Kusama, but the lady fascinates me. Her show at Louisiana is very popular, and Instagram is overflowing with a veritable polka dot frenzy. And I still feel the need to write another blog post about her. Or rather her pumpkins, mostly. 

But first a few words. I like her art in a very simple, straightforward way - it's pretty, it's graphically bold, and it's extremely colorful. So, for me, it's natural to like. I know several people who find her work somewhat shallow and superficial, and yes, she does seem to repeat herself a lot, and no, there is perhaps not a lot to say about dots, come to think of it. Other than the fact that they are pretty, and perhaps resemble the stars of the universe, or perhaps also tiny cells in a Petri dish. The wonders of the small and the huge, etc. etc.

But the show at Louisiana, which is big and cover most of her career in a quite narrative and educational way, made me see something more than the dots. I saw her obsession, and how clinging to the obsession, is her way of staying sane and relatively happy. And how painting is, quite simply, physical therapy. And soothing meditation.

It's not as if these are deep or profound conclusions, but they really set my mind to work, and most especially, at how she has managed the superhuman workload of physically creating her pieces!

As far as I have been able to find out, she does not employ a hoard of assistants - but much is unclear about Yayoi, who is sometimes a bit enigmatic, when answering questions in interviews. In this one, she claims to have done her work herself, and makes a point of it.

I started really looking at her pumpkins. They have become her sort of peace-love-fertility symbol, and are said to be a reference to childhood memories. She grew up in a wealthy family who had a seed- and vegetable business, and has told, somewhere, about feeling guilty about the abundance of food her family had, in war times when the Japanese were starving.

At Louisiana they meet you already outside in bronze supersize, and there are several fine pumpkin works inside - especially a giant yellow/black cabinet, filled with pumpkins. 

(I borrowed the top photo from Designboom, and the cabinet one from snilla.blogspot)

I don't think there is even an official estimate at how many times she has painted, drawn or sculpted this plump vegetable. I just fill with wonder at how much variety she puts into this tedious motif.

Just see how she does the stems in slightly different ways - how she has a variety of ways to do those rows of dots that make up their pattern, and how they vary a lot in their outer shape. But still seems to be the same kind of pumpkin. 

All those little varieties and decisions - about every single one of those pumpkins. I know she did a lot of other types of wildly repetitive and detailed themes, the Infinity nets, for instance, but I just love those pumpkins for their way of occupying her mind for a whole, long lifetime.

So, when I saw a cheap papier-mâché pumpkin in my local hobby shop round Halloween, I just knew I had to make a close study of her pumpkins in the most obvious way: I had to make one myself! And I had to be very faithful to her way of doing them, I had to deliberately copy her, just to feel it.

So, one pumpkin and some paint supplies later, I set to work.

I gave it a few coats of spray paint, and had decided (wisely) to not do the dots with a brush, but rather with Posca markers. I started with the stem, and decided on a 'random dots' type stem. Then I did the tiny ones in the grooves of the pumpkin, and moved on to the central rows of big dots on the swollen parts of the pumpkin. And then moved on to the smaller rows on the sides.

Here are some numbers: After about 1200 hand painted dots and some eight to ten hours of fiddly work doing them - spread out over a few evenings and a Sunday morning - I ended up here. And decided that my pumpkin was done. Yayoi would have kept at it, of course.

So, you might say I took a very small stroll in Yayoi's polka dot shoes. And that was interesting.

A bit of Yayoi and a bit of anniversary

Louisiana has a stunning Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the moment, and it is not to be missed, if you are in the least bit interested in visual art, art history, pop art - or if you just happen to like to have your senses bombarded with color and wowness. It is a very in-depth look at her long life as an artist, and I found it completely absorbing, and spent hours there, even reading a lot of the tiny print about her fascinating life.

I have written a bit about her before, a mini-portrait of sorts, read here, and also a bit here (I am a great Yayoi-enthusiast!) and I have shown some of her most characteristic polkadotty work - so I thought I'd show some impressions from the Louisiana show, of her more subdued work. All her work is a partly about obsessive repetition, but you have seen the colorful dots and pumpkins such a lot, and I was thrilled to see these pale, discreet paintings (the Infinity nets), all the beautiful black/white photos and her graphic work. 

I also adore the color explosions, the whole sensory overload - and if you do too, you will be richly rewarded. But I really like this side of Yayoi Kusama, and of the exhibition. You should really, really go see it! It ends in late January 2016.

And now for a bit of a long PS:

I discovered, quite randomly, that this is my blog post number 200!

This is not what I had ever in my wildest fantasy imagined, when I started a little semi-private advent calendar event in 2011, but this blogging thing has grown on me. 

I will never be an every-day-kind-of-blogger, not even close, but as it is, I always have much, much more I would like to write about, than I actually manage to find time for - and that tells me I should keep it up. Also, I started a job outside home recently, with an almost full weekly schedule, and that makes blogging harder, but not impossible, no no.

And Christmas will come to the blog as well, for the fifth season this year - yay, another anniversary! 

There will be paper projects - well, not quite daily, but absolutely weekly. So keep the printer, the scissors and the glue handy. And if you want to get warmed up a bit; here's a Pinterest board that links to most the DIY's I have posted over the years - or go to 'DIY's - the full list' in the top menu on this page.

And this year I will even open a small online shop, as well - for one very special product!
More about this is to come, real soon. I'll keep you posted.

Let me use this PS to thank everyone who finds their way to these pages. You are so very welcome, and I hope that my tips, thoughts or paper designs add a bit of color to your life. And you are always more than welcome to leave a small (or large!) comment and let me know who you are.
 

I'd love to know!

A great excuse for some George Clooney (as if you'll need one)

When I wished Yayoi Kusama a happy birthday on Saturday, I felt I had to limit the amount of images to a nice selection, just enough to get people curious, if they were not familiar with her. So I didn't post these fantastic ones of George Clooney, styled and staged by Yayoi herself (photographer: Emma Summerton). Too bad, I thought, cause they are so cool. But I'll just post them today instead, ha ha. 

They are from the December 2013 art issue of W Magazine, where five female artists had their way with the dapper George - and there is a interview with him as well. See the lot of it, right here!

He proves, once again, that he looks insanely good and completely at ease, no matter the situation.

Happy birthday Yayoi Kusama

(film still from Princess of Polka Dots, a documentary in the making, see more here)

One of my favourite artists, Japanese Yayoi Kusama, is 85 years old today, so let's have a little birthday celebration here! This great little colorful Japanese lady is still active, and as far as I can see (it took a little weird google translate from japanese), she participates in an art festival in Japan, opening on April 10th, and did a huge solo exhibition in New York last year, with series of enormous, psycedelic canvases, massive room installations, videos and whatnot. Her work is all over the world, and right here in my local modern art museum, Louisiana, there is a permanent Yayoi Kusama room installation, which is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful (and slightly vertigo-inducing) works you can see there.

(Gleaming Lights of the Souls, Louisiana, Denmark)

When you look at her work you see a sort of reckless, almost intoxicating, joyfullness, a wild and humourous love of color and of simple graphic statements (especially polka dots!), repeated and stretched to an almost impossible scale - but the story of her own life is that of a woman a little less happy go lucky than you might think. She was born in a bourgeois Japanese family, and started studying classical Japanese painting, at a very young age. She rebelled against that and her whole background, and ventured to the US in the fifties to become one of the most important avant garde artists of her generation, working not only in painting and sculpture, but as a tireless anti war activist, feminist and political performance artist. She stayed in the states for most of the sixties and seventies, and was a huge influence on many younger artists, such as Andy Warhol.

(from a 1967 performance in Woodstock)

She has had a rocky life and a vulnerable soul, and in the seventies she decided that it was best for her to let herself voluntarily commit to an institution for the mentally ill, back in her native Japan - and that is where she still lives and works today. She has her studio nearby, and comes and goes as she pleases.

Read much more here and here. And now, let's look at her fantastic art....

Some of her signature polka dot installation work - the last image is from the show in New York, 2013

Here, below, are some of her paintings in the 'infinity' style, where she expands a simple motif on and on and on, and creates these dizzying, swirling patterns. Infinity and space are important themes in her art.

The pumpkin is another theme, and she has made many of them - she explains that they are both symbolical self portraits and childhood memories. Her family were well off merchants, and in a (war)time of food shortage in most of Japan, she remembers warehouses full of local produce, such as these pumpkins, she has depicted again and again. Here is a large scale fibreglass pumpkin from the nineties, on the end of a pier in Naoshima, Japan:

The last picture is one I found long ago and I bookmarked, not even realizing it was Yayoi Kusama, but simply because it is such a lovely portrait of a serious little girl. When I clicked on the image and read more about it, I saw who it was! The photographer is unknown (as far as I have been able to find out), but she is ten years old here, the young Yayoi. Yayoi is a traditional Japanese March girls name (it is the old Japanese name for the month of March), and means 'full life'.