British artist Hush builds up powerful portraits of pale-faced geishas with floral forms and graffiti tags; these figures appear to emerge from Hush’s paint strokes and personify his painting process itself. Rather than creating a tension between the geishas’ delicate robes and hair and the grittiness of graffiti, Hush does away with the contrasting connotations of this imagery and takes it for its formal qualities. We see more similarities than differences between the traditional Japanese textile patterns and the contemporary urban letter styles. Mimicking the way tags accumulate and degrade over time on city walls, Hush creates his compositions by adding layers of painted and screen printed imagery. The artist is debuting a solo show at Corey Helford Gallery this Saturday, May 18. Take a look at some of his new work below.