How would Gauguin be remembered if he hadn't chanced upon the lurid earthiness of Tahiti and its women? Would Van Gogh have made the same impact without sunflowers and cornfields to unleash his frenzy for yellow? After mastering the basics of their craft, the next important thing for painters is to find the perfect subject matter for their brush.

In the case of Chikako Ikeguchi, enjoying a retrospective of her art at Tokyo's Shoto Museum, the important moment came during a 1987 tour of the western part of the North American continent with her husband, a famous economist, ex-government minister, and writer, widely known in Japan by his pen name Taichi Sakaiya.

Having fallen asleep on a coach traveling across the flatlands of the Canadian province of Alberta, Ikeguchi woke up during a refueling stop and looked out the window. There she saw a railway freight station surrounded by giant grain silos, presenting her with unusual shapes and colors.

"It was like a different planet," she tells The Japan Times. "You can never find such scenery in Japan. These huge buildings with their distinct colors are just located on a great plain, and these are the only things that exist in that vast plain, with no people."

The following year, Ikeguchi and Sakaiya flew back to Calgary, hired a car and looked for the remote location that had so impressed her.

While earlier pictures at the exhibition have the atmosphere of art college about them, Ikeguchi's paintings of the freight station and the silos have an aura of true originality and excitement. Executed back in the studio with rollers and brushes, and employing an Expressionist use of color that is both smoky and luminous, works such as "Wheatpool II" (1990), "Dusk" (1991) and "Sunset" (1991) successfully convey her initial sense of awed amazement.

In these landscapes and later paintings showing North American towns and cities, space and line are subtly bent. It is easy to read this as a reaction to the vastness, almost a borderline agoraphobia that causes Ikeguchi to bend the scenery back toward her, rather than to follow geometrically straight lines of perspective off into infinity. Such a compositional element gives many of these airy canvases of expansive North American views a note of intimacy, warmth and inner realization.

Even more impressive than her landscapes are the portraits the 65-year-old painter has been working on in the last 10 years. Those on display all feature young, blonde foreign women in smart interiors, usually next to a window. This is a popular theme at the moment, if the concurrently running Vermeer and Wilhelm Hammershoi exhibitions are anything to go by.

Ikeguchi rejects the implication that she might be pandering to popular tastes, but why then does she choose to work with foreign models?

"I want to encourage viewers to have expansive dreams," she explains. "I think that it will be more impressive for them to see Western women, rather than Japanese women. I am happy if my work helps viewers to move their minds to a different place."

Another reason is that she enjoys the objective distance that using foreign models brings. "Courtyard" (2008) shows a young, sophisticated, urban woman looking through a window that shows her reflection.

"The common point of these women is that they are models who I paint only once, and I will usually never meet again," she says. "This woman, for example, is from Harvard University, but I don't really know their backgrounds or the lives they are leading. Because of the language barrier, there is a kind of distance."

Ikeguchi says that painting Western models is not entirely separate from the way she paints flowers, presenting her with technical problems of shape and color rather than issues of character, mood, and sympathy. The distance between the artist and the subject is expressed in the frequent use of oblique poses: models look to the side, or only their head is turned toward the viewpoint of the artist and viewer, as in "A Burgundy Sweater" (2002-03). The effect is heightened by the neutral, slightly melancholic expressions. When the obliqueness of a model's pose combines with angled walls, and reflections, in paintings such as "A Burgundy Sweater" and "Courtyard," interesting visual ricochets are set up that energize otherwise serene paintings.

Though born from the distance between artist and model, these elements encourage a sympathetic involvement on the part of the viewer. The ambiguity of their appearances allows the viewer to construct their own narrative of the subjects' thoughts.

"My husband, who is a writer, says the same thing," Ikeguchi says, confirming the impression. "He sometimes says he feels like writing a novel based on one of my paintings. But in my case, I don't have any sort of story in mind. Maybe it's because I'm a painter."

"Chikako Ikeguchi" is showing at the Shibuya Shoto Museum of Art till Nov. 24; admission ¥300; open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (closed Mon.). For more information call (03) 3465-9421 or visit www.city.shibuya.tokyo.jp/est/museum/