The art of Yayoi Kusama

Copyright Yayoi Kusama. Image courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

An ocean of droplets . . . lights that seem to stretch into infinity . . . and everywhere polka dots. This is the art of Yayoi Kusama. The 83-year-old Japanese artist is being celebrated with a major retrospective at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art.

Left: Yayoi Kusama photographed with her latest paintings at Musashi University.

Kusama's fixation with polka dots, she tells CBS News correspondent Mo Rocca, stems from lifelong hallucinations. "I had a very miserable childhood and have been fighting against mental stress that comes from that," she said. "Producing art has been my cure for many years. I feel better when I make things and draw. So I make more."

Left: Yayoi Kusama working in her studio, January 2010.

Raised in a conservative family on a flower farm in Matsumoto, Japan, her earliest works were far from traditional. Frustrated with the confines of the Japanese art world, a 27-year old Kusama wrote to artist Georgia O'Keeffe. When O'Keeffe wrote back, it was all the encouragement Kusama needed to leave Japan for New York.

"If I had stayed in Japan, I would never have grown as I have, either as an artist or as a human being," she wrote in her autobiography, "Infinity Net." "America is really the country that raised me, and I owe what I have become to her."

Left: Yayoi Kusama at age 10, 1939.

Kusama made a splash with her vast infinity net paintings, inspired by memories of the pebbles in the creek running through her backyard in Japan.

Whitney curator David Kiehl says the first word he would use to describe Kusama's art is "Obsession, in that she's repeating over and over again gestures, or filling up all the spaces . . .

"The idea of layering something, and also the constant repetition. As you repeat that gesture over and over again, you're saying, 'I am here. I am here.' She has amazing control."

"Corpses" (1950) by Yayoi Kusama. Oil on canvas.

"A Flower" (1952) by Yayoi Kusama. Ink on paper.

"The Germ" (1952), by Yayoi Kusama. Ink and pastel on paper.

By the mid-1960s Kusama had become a tabloid fixture, known for "happenings" - gatherings where she painted polka dots on everything, and everyone!

left: Kusama, at the "Bust Out Happening at Sheep Meadow in Central Park" (1969).

An image of Yayoi Kusama from her slide projection "Walking Piece New York" (1966).

Photo by Thomas Haar, courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

Left: Kusama Fashions, 1970.

In the early Seventies, the art world had forgotten Kusama, and she moved back to Japan - where she checked herself into a Tokyo mental hospital. She has lived there, and worked there, ever since.

She also moved from painting to installations, known as "accumulations."

Left: "Leftover Snow in the Dream" (1982), by Yayoi Kusama. Plasticine, wood and paint.

"Heaven and Earth" (1991) by Yayoi Kusama.

Photograph courtesy Robert Miller Gallery

"Fireflies on the Water" (2002), by Yayoi Kusama, comprised of mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights and water.

"The Earth is a polka dot, Moon is a polka dot, Sun, Mars, all of them are polka dots," Yayoi Kusama said. "I realized my life is only a small portion of this universe. It's a mere dot."

Yayoi Kusama in "Yellow Tree" furniture room, at Aich triennale, Nagoya, Japan, 2010.

Recently Kusawa collaborated with designer Marc Jacobs on a collection for Louis Vuitton.

An illustration by Yayoi Kusama for a new edition of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

In 2008, one of her works sold for the extraordinary price of $5.1 million - a record for a living female artist.

"I've heard of people say that they were moved and impressed by my work. I am very thankful and mentally relieved and serene when I get comments like that," Kusama told Rocca. "It gives me the incentive to keep painting and continue living this life."

"I want to go to heaven knowing that I have created color in my own and other people's lives."

Sheldan C. Collins/Whitney Museum of American Art

An installation view of the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition of works by Yayoi Kusama.

For more info:
Yayoi Kusama, Whitney Museum of Art, New York (through Sept. 30, 2012)

By CBSNews.com senior editor David Morgan