When I was a child, I used to paint intently. The older I become, and the closer death approaches, the brighter my life gets day by day.
Interpretation
As we grow older and confront mortality, we may find deeper appreciation and vibrancy in life.
In this quote, Yayoi Kusama reflects on her childhood passion for painting and how, with age and the awareness of mortality, her life becomes richer and more vivid. It suggests that the inevitability of death brings a newfound clarity and intensity to the experience of living, encouraging individuals to embrace life's brightness despite its fleeting nature.
In practice
This quote can be shared during an art exhibit to inspire appreciation for creativity at all ages.
A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots can't stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement... Polka-dots are a way to infinity.
The thought of continually eating something like macaroni, spat out by machinery, fills me with fear and revulsion, so I make macaroni sculptures. I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this 'obliteration.'
It doesn't matter at all for me that I work in hospital or anywhere with limited space. Every day, I'm creating new works with all my might.
You should create a work that is so valuable it might eventually sell at a high price, but you've got to concentrate on how you create that artwork.
I offer my performance as prayer for someone I've worked with as an actor or someone who has died. The image that comes into my head as I walk to the stage, I offer that performance up for that person.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
In the music business, we all do different things, but we sit there and admire other people who can write a song differently or sing differently. It's not so competitive.
Everything vanishes round me and good works rise from me of their own accord.
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