Miho Hirano’s decorative oils of young women are as delicate as cool watercolors. Paintings of beautiful girls are often critiqued as the objects of the male gaze, the patronized objects of sexual desire, and patriarchal oppression, but here they are the elemental subject of a woman’s eye, and Hirano’s subject is a modern muse—a reassuring goddess born to this fearful age under the female gaze. In Time of Eternity she gazes back at us from under a hood of earthy roots, through a rain of crystalline droplets. The paintings aren’t self-portraits, although Hirano explains she uses herself as a reference, but the woman exists “only in the world I draw.” In Serenity of Mind she is wrapped in the embrace of filigreed water. In Wishes, her hair becomes a tangle of windswept ribbons. These aren’t paintings made to express romance or love, but “to capture the subtle flickering of emotions that arise from our relationships with people and our environment.” Hirano says,

“…nature can be healing, bountiful and sometimes fierce, but it can also be gentle and dangerous and changeable.”