Hitoko Urago pairs paintings — portraits with abstractions — though each work is not necessarily conceived at the same time. "Untitled (Lynda)" (2012), for example, depicts a profile of a black woman with big hair against a green background. She is paired with a soft, spotty green abstraction, which becomes more of a chromatic harmony complementing the visage.
The pairing makes the artist's extremely beautiful women all the more alluring. In "Triangular Utopia 'Connected'/ I go to bed" (2012), we get a vortex of orange and red triangular abstraction paired with a full-length portrait of a woman in a see-through nightgown open to the navel, breasts bared. It is nearly unavoidable to link the hot colors and pointed abstraction to the come-hither eyes and overt sexual disposition. Such subject matter is related to Urago's art training and her work styling models while living in London.
While the artist says she largely takes her inspiration from musical impressions and is not directly influenced by the history of Western painting (though she is always aware of it), there is an almost clandestine linking of cosmetic concerns with 20th-century modernism.