about me

Yukiko paints the images that come to her, quiet ones, usually, the kind that arrive before she quite understands them.

She picked watercolours back up during the pandemic, returning to something she'd loved since she was a child. There was just something about the way colour moves and bleeds on wet paper that suited what she was starting to see.

Years of studying astrology, tarot, and colour therapy shaped how she got here. It was through that practice that the images first started showing up, often while she was driving, or in some completely ordinary moment, arriving all at once as a full scene. She rarely knows what they mean when they come. She just gets them down on paper and lets the meaning catch up later.

Animals, plants, colour that moves like a rainbow, these show up again and again in her work, though she couldn't tell you exactly why. She doesn't plan the details out. She follows the image and sees where it takes her.

She also makes what she calls Tsugi Art: small torn pieces of throwaway things, old advertisements mostly, worked into the painting itself. Watercolour joins them into something new, and somehow the story that comes out is about renewal, or hope, or connection, nothing she set out to say, just what happens when the ordinary gets folded in.

A small dragon fairy turns up in her paintings sometimes, tucked in where you might not notice at first. It's become something like a studio mascot, a little bit of mischief, a reason to look twice.

Once a piece is finished, that's often when the real story arrives: someone sees it, reaches out, tells her what it means to them, and the pieces Yukiko couldn't quite see on her own start to fall into place. In a way, nothing she paints is really finished until it finds the person it was meant for.