Toko Okamoto has been an escort runner of Yasunari Ikenagawho has led a trend of “beauty painting”. The females she depicts are swaying between hope and despair and her painting figuresas painted by a female artist acquired the sympathy of many people. However, I cannot say yes or no whether the females depicted by her deserve beauty painting or not.
At first, if beautiful pin-up girls deserve “beauty painting” in a narrow sense, her female figures are always somewhat afar from that standard. In a word, she seems to make a point of depicting identical person irrespective of female beauty.
If so, what she aims to paint? It may be to paint beauty, in the context of redefining beauty painting, of which Shoen attained the summit and once dismantled by the Osaka painting circles.
Certainly, we can notice the atmosphere of beauty painting of Taisho period obliged to reform according to the change of self consciousness of the females painted.
However, it seems to me that she stays to more private domain rather than sticks to“beauty painting” in the sense of art history.
By the way, what concerns most is that how she challenges the life and death struggles in the future.
I believe in her potentiality. I hear say that she has had some kind of limiting conditions by her personal circumstances and it is now ameliorating. I am very much looking forward to her change from now on. I believe that her drawers are storing much more than what she had shown us these ten years.
We, Shukado, began to support her exposure to the SNS, so as to report to our clients about her activities on real time. As you may notice her luscious and delicate expression of female figures exhibited in Art Fair Tokyo, she will continue to change, to our expectation. We would like to have your patronage on her in the future.