How to draw POINPO

Hello friends, welcome to Wednesday’s intriguing tangle.

I was reminded of this tangle in the archives by CZT Angie Gittles’s “infatuation with using dots”, such as we explored on Monday.

Poinpo is from Taiwan CZT Lin Chiu and it is much more than the sum of its part: that simple, elemental stroke: the dot.

I thought Poinpo looked so easy and yet once I got started I found it requires more focus than you might think. Focus to determine the spacing but even more for creating the right proportion of graduating dots to create an overall pattern in whatever configuration you can think of. Here are a few examples on one of Lin’s Zentangle® tiles. This one includes a frame of Poinpo surrounding the Zentangle®-original Mooka filled with Onamato.

What intrigued me even more about Poinpo was not the tangle itself but Lin’s inspiration and the artist who created it:

This installation is by internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, born March 22, 1929 (age 93). She’s a fascinating character as we learn courtesy of Wikipedia.

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. … She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan. …

Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. Kusama was inspired, however, by American Abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement.  …

Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world.

Entrance to the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, a museum dedicated to the work of the Japanese artist.

Kusama has been open about her mental health. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. She reported in the interview she did with Infinity Net “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.“

… When Kusama was ten years old, she began to experience vivid hallucinations which she has described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. These hallucinations also included flowers that spoke to Kusama, and patterns in fabric that she stared at coming to life, multiplying, and engulfing or expunging her, a process which she has carried into her artistic career and which she calls “self-obliteration”. Kusama’s art became her escape from her family and her own mind when she began to have hallucinations. She was reportedly fascinated by the smooth white stones covering the bed of the river near her family home, which she cites as another of the seminal influences behind her lasting fixation on dots.

An exhibition Yayoi Kusama made for the Helsinki Art Museum in October 2016.

Another of Lin’s Poinpo tiles together with the Zentangle-original Betweed:

In this case steps are hardly necessary, however Lin illustrates in a single line the step-by-step instructions for drawing Poinpo below. She includes the name of the artist (last name first) inspiring her tangle as well as several ways to create designs with it.

Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. These images are for your personal offline reference only. Please feel free to refer to the images to recreate this tangle in your personal Zentangles and ZIAs. However the artist and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to the images and they must not be publicly pinned, altered, reproduced or republished. (Small side note: if you look at the legalese in Pinterest, you are legally responsible for obtaining permission to post every photo that gets ‘Pinned’. Giving credit or sharing the source link doesn’t count.) Thank you for respecting these rights. “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” ~ Albus Dumbledore

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Check out the tag linc for more of Lin’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Related Links

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5. Linda's List of Zentangle-Original Patterns — here is the complete list of original tangles (aka "official tangles") created and introduced by founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, including those not published online. If you are new to the Zentangle Method I highly recommend learning a few of the published Zentangle classics first.
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