Her career as an artist began in Canada.

Yuriko's work captures timeless serenity through landscapes and florals rendered with intense detail and remarkable technical control. Her florals consistently employ wax resist to manage watercolour on highly porous rice paper, while some landscape pieces forego wax entirely, relying on skill alone. Working primarily on location in watercolour and pencil sketch, she strives to honour simplification, decorativeness, and nature's enduring qualities. As David Kung noted in The Contemporary Artist in Japan, these same qualities—"simplification, decorativeness and serenity"—have influenced Japanese art throughout its history, and they abound in Yuriko's body of work. Her stated aim—to capture "the timeless serenity, the power and endurance of rugged mountains, the delicacy of a flower, or the essence of the human figure"—remains evident across four decades of dedicated practice.

Yuriko Igarashi Kitamura (Japanese/Canadian, 1939-) is a celebrated artist whose journey from Hokkaido, Japan to Alberta, Canada reflects both personal transformation and artistic evolution. After completing a BSc in Pharmacology in Japan, she moved to the United States in the early 1960s before settling in Canada in the mid-1960s. Her artistic career flourished in Alberta, where she became widely recognized as the originator of dye-painting on rice paper—a distinctive technique she taught through the University of Alberta, Faculty of Extension for over fourteen years, alongside numerous workshops across the province. Now in her late eighties, Yuriko remains a respected figure in Canadian art circles.

Her artistic development emerged from disciplined experimentation and cross-cultural influence. Beginning with batik fabric work using wax resist and graphite drawings on paper, Yuriko enrolled in art courses at the University of Alberta under Mr. Harry Savage. His introduction to Emile Nolde's watercolour approach sparked her experimentation with watercolour on rice paper. Through considerable trial and error, she developed her own unique technique—dye-painting on rice paper—which became her specialty. The process evolved progressively, moving from batik on cotton to working with watercolour, fabric dye, and wax on rice paper, eventually refining to remove fabric dye while maintaining the wax resist method for controlled application.