Kusama’s family made their living by cultivating plant seeds and she grew up surrounded by fields full of flowers. This formative environment has been a touchstone for the artist throughout her life. From her earliest sketches to her most recent large-scale sculptures, Kusama has been fascinated by the plant world.

One of Kusama’s earliest surviving works is a sketchbook she kept as a student, the pages of which are full of detailed drawings of peonies. These precise depictions transformed into more allusive imagery in her works of the 1950s.
During the early 50’s Kusama continued to develop her skills and directions through hundreds of works on paper. She produced these works through a variety of media which included watercolor, ink, pastel, gouache and tempera.

Exemplary of this artistic development, A Flower (1952) presents the viewer with an amorphous vegetative shape, organic in form and bursting with color. Created with gouache and pastel on paper, Kusama paints petals and leaves in deep hues of indigo and violet suspended in a dark center, surrounded by a wash of burnt sienna that suffuses the work entirely. A Flower also subtly foreshadows the artist’s fascination with dots — peppering her painting with blue-green spots in a manner that would become her signature style for the remainder of her artistic career.

It was in 1948 that Kusama began to study Nihonga painting in Kyoto. This was characterized as a particular Japanese style of painting, tied to Japanese nationalism. However, since Kusama became dissatisfied with these conventions of teaching, she sought out information about the prevailing European and American art, including the avant-garde.