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.
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
It's wonderful to play a villain who gets a laugh or to stop a comedy dead in its tracks with a touching moment. It's kind of like a symphony that has very different movements.
All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.
Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.
I'm an artist. Artists don't need permission to work. Regardless of whether I'm acting or not, I write. I write when I'm tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.
Everyone who makes a film is at the major distributors' mercy.
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