Yayoi Kusama's Flowers C (2005) takes a potted arrangement of tulips and covers every element — pot, stems, leaves, blooms — in a different pattern, the image built from red and green on a golden yellow ground that gives the whole image a warmth closer to Byzantine mosaic than to conventional flower painting. The pot at the base is rendered in a brick-like rectangular pattern, the same system used in the Lemon Squash foreground but here applied to a terracotta vessel that reads as both functional and architectural. The stems and leaves carry dense parallel lines of green dots, the blooms in red with green dot details, each element described in its own system whilst sharing the same limited palette of red, green and gold. The saturated yellows and heightened colour contrasts place the work within a longer history of floral painting, recalling the intensified palettes of Vincent van Gogh’s late still lifes whilst replacing expressive brushwork with tightly controlled repeated marks.

One flower droops to the right, its head turned downward — the only asymmetrical note in an otherwise upright image, a detail that gives the arrangement an unexpected tenderness. The golden yellow ground is covered in the linear ground that runs through much of Kusama's work from this period, every inch of the background activated in the same gold tone as the ground itself so that the pattern almost disappears into it, visible only on close inspection.

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