De Soto's exquisitely rendered paintings are set in surreal, cloudy otherworlds where darkening skies merge into bloody landscapes. Rich with mythical and religious imagery, they are the realms of centaurs and angels, gods and monsters. The symbolism of the strange, seductive tableaux in which De Soto places her naked figures - where glass bells imprison them, thorns puncture their skin, blood trickles and roses bloom - also suggest psychosexual overtones. Pleasure, in De Soto's works, is often pain; beauty is often bound up in horror.

The human figure, however, is De Soto's central concern. Influenced by the classical Renaissance ideal form of the human body, De Soto captures the beauty of perfectly proportioned naked limbs, the luminosity of flesh, the subtleties of light on skin sculpting muscle. De Soto often uses her own image and the images of people she knows as models in her paintings, reflecting their humanism: "I like painting people I love... I like it to come back to humanity. I find people endlessly fascinating."

Though De Soto uses traditional oil, glaze and varnish techniques, she restricts herself to only four colours, mauve, pale green, reddish-brown and an ivory white, lending her paintings an atmospheric, dreamlike quality.