People are always interested in what the artist Ritsuko Sato is doing. When not in Kurashiki City, her home and workplace, she zips around the country holding both individual group exhibitions.

Over the past few years, however, her activities have taken on a whole new dimension, reflecting the rapid changes that are constantly occurring in our increasingly information-oriented society.

Now exhibiting overseas, the ambitious Ms. Sato is one of Japan's most active painters on the international stage. Never one to rest on her laurels, her works are becoming increasingly positive and international in flavor.

Ms. Sato has the perfectionism and extreme confidence common to many artists, yet she also shows an outstanding concern for the people around her. This speaks much of her character and depth as an artist.

Her paintings portray the relationships between people. In many of her works, the characters she encounters during her extensive travels overseas seem to provide much of her motivation. In recent years she appears to be paying homage to her adopted second home, the US, by including characters from various comics and illustrations in her work. This also reveals the incredible attention she pays to her surroundings as an artist.

Sato's works are by no means subtle or predictable. Her often deformed motifs dynamically combine chaotic and random strokes with bright, vibrant colors. The effects are almost child-like in their innocence, revealing Sato's unique impressions and interpretations of the world around her.

Sato grasps the vigor of abstract expressionism and combines it with everyday pop art in her own way. Rather than reflecting the serious nature of conceptual art, a mainstream from in modern painting often involving the communication of messages in words and letters, Ms. Sato's works celebrate the intrinsic joy of painting while communicating a range of rich emotions.

People contemplating her work are stuck by its vivid, fluid nature. Her messages are conveyed intelligently, even powerfully, unconstrained by any regimes of convention. She skillfully combines oil paints with media such as acrylic paint, GANSAI(rock-paint natural pigments), charcoal, pastels, resin, foam, paper and plywood in a unique style to achieve the effects she conceives.

Her work is constantly evolving and very much "outside the square." While aware of the preconceptions of her viewers, she deliberately ignores them and confronts them with the question "what is painting really all about?"

She is certainly an artist to watch.