Let's take a look at a painting by Yayoi Kusama named Number F. This canvas comes from 1959 and it's one of her Infinity Net paintings. This is really her signature style, the one that really drives the majority of the creative production, really of her entire career. When we think about a net, realize that this is a perfect grid when it's woven or sewn but of course once you start to use it that grid deforms, becomes soft, and round and looping. And in fact that is exactly what we are looking at here. I want to start in with these holes. Remember that she's previously worked with polka dots, so we know she has inverted the figure ground relationships here. Those polka dots are no longer dots but spaces between these woven lattice of brushwork with the white stuff on the top. But as we zoom in on these holes, they're not so simple. When you look at this painting overall, you get the impression of a very thickly painted, heavily encrusted surface, and it's true, but first she's working very thinly she's working in oils. She's using a generous amount of turpentine here and she's layering these two colors over each other, the black and the white here, in a way that you see both. In other words, it's a very active surface, it's not opaque, it's not thick and it's not a simple color that she's going to be using as a background. So, having worked with this washed scrubbed appearance of this black and white background, she then switches gears into really the bulk of this painting. And this is thick toothpaste quality artist oil paint rather than adding medium linseed oil, which of course, thins the paint lowers its viscosity we see her doing that sometimes, for example here, where the paint has a more liquid quality, a softer, thinner quality. But then, as we move here we realize this is very stiff paint adjacent to it. Now, it's all the same color, it's very likely all from the same tube or maybe a couple tubes of the same paint. But, she's changing the consistency of it continually as she's looping mark to mark across the canvas. Let's talk about these marks, since this is a gestural painting after all, these are not the heroic gestures between quotes of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock here. These are really rotations of the knuckles and of the wrists. So a much gentler, a much more quiet approach to the surface here but still an extremely gestural one. We think about this painting as an action painting, as a painting that recalls how it's being made. It's very transparent. We can understand every single mark on this painting. And in fact, we can start to extrapolate what the practice of making this painting would be like or feel like. Kusama has a lot of patience, or perhaps you say anxiety, as she's working again and again and again and again in this very serialized, very repetitive process. This is an easel-scale canvas and we could image that she was probably painting on the surface here for several hours. Stepping back from the canvas now and appreciating again the overall composition, we see the net effect of all of those transitions of the paint itself, changing the viscosity of the paint from thick to thin etc. Essentially what this does is it creates multiple centers of gravity in the painting. There are dense areas, there are weaker, looser painted areas and as your eye wanders restlessly around this all over composition, there are some anchors where your eye really gets weighted down by this very heavy encrusted area of the painting such as this one we're looking at now. Let's quickly take a look at a couple other examples here so you have a sense of the variety of infinity Nets that she's working with. Sometimes fluorescent colors, sometimes monochrome paintings, sometimes very loud screaming almost psychedelic kind of paintings and other times very calm quiet almost Minimalist kind of paintings. So like many of the artists in this course there is a single idea but on this theme, there are infinite numbers of variations when an artist has found very rich fertile territory to explore and comes back and finds as many different versions of this fundamental idea as possible.