Yayoi Kusama's Summer Flowers (1990) fills the image with five blooms in pink, orange and red rising on long green stems against a deep blue ground — the flowers large and loosely open, their petals covered in a network of fine lines and rounded marks, the stems and leaves in green with white dot sequences running along their edges, the whole image dense with colour and mark without a single area left untreated. The flowers vary in size and stage of opening — the three largest in the upper portion of the image fully open with stamens extending outward in yellow and orange, two smaller blooms lower in the image still partially closed. Each petal carries its own network of fine marks that follows the curved surface, the pink petals covered in a red dot-and-line system, the orange blooms in a larger rounded pattern that gives them a different texture from the pink ones.

The stems rise and curve in parallel columns from the base, the yellow-green leaves extending outward along their length, every surface carrying the same density of white dot marks. The blue ground is covered in a fine green network of irregular lines — present but subdued, the dark blue dominant and the lines visible on close inspection, the background receding behind the vivid colours of the flowers in a way that gives the image the quality of stained glass, the blooms luminous against the deep field behind them. The connection to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts tradition is unavoidable — the all-over floral pattern, the dense ground, the flat treatment of botanical forms against a saturated background. Where Morris used the flat flower and leaf pattern to celebrate craft and the natural world, Kusama uses it as a vehicle for the same mark-making investigation she applies to every subject, the decorative tradition absorbed into her own system rather than referenced from outside it.

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