Yayoi Kusama's Watermelon (1986) is one of the most playful images in her printed output — a half watermelon sitting on a yellow surface, its red flesh covered in black seeds and red dots, scattered cutlery lying across the yellow foreground in red, blue and green, the whole scene given the cheerful directness of a child's illustration submitted to a rigorous marking system. The watermelon dominates the upper half of the image, its white rind rendered in pink dots, its red interior covered in large black seed shapes and small red dots scattered across the flesh, the teal of the rind's inner edge providing a cool accent between the white and the red. above it the yellow surface carries a pattern of rounded shapes in a darker yellow, the texture covering the foreground completely. The cutlery — a fork, a spoon, a knife — are scattered across this yellow surface in different colours, each one covered in its own pattern, the objects lying at different angles as though dropped rather than placed.

The deep blue-purple ground behind the watermelon is covered in a dense network of rounded shapes — a dark, closely packed field that makes the bright colours of the watermelon and foreground read with maximum intensity against it, the contrast between the warm yellows and reds and the cool dark ground giving the image its particular vibrancy. The subject places this alongside the Lemon Squash works and the Fruits still life in a strand of Kusama's printed output that treats food and domestic objects with the same systematic attention she brings to the pumpkin and the net — the everyday object not elevated or ironised but simply covered, repeated dots applied to a watermelon with exactly the same seriousness it is applied to everything else.

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