Born in Rome in 1929,Yoshiko Ishikawa began her art training at the age of seven, and grew up surrounded by European, and primarily Italian, art. She studied at the Japan Women"s University in Tokyo from 1946 to 1950. At the age of thirty she began a series of flowers, which reminded her of the similarity between the life of flowers and humans. Using traditional Japanese flowers as well as Western varieties, Ishikawa imbued her oil paintings and drawings with a lyrical sense of movement and color. In 1979, she was the recipient of the Taormina Art Award and had work accepted for the Eighth Nitten Exhibition in 1952 and in the Yasui Award Exhibition in 1965 and 1967. A retrospective exhibition of her work titled Flowers of Light was held at the Vecchio Palace in Florence in 2000 and then at the Hakone Open Air Museum in Japan in 2002.