Frank Okada at Greg Kucera

At first glance, the large abstractions of Frank Okada seem derivative of Leon Polk Smith or other hard-edge painters. Okada worked in an Abstract-Expressionist style during the '50s and '60s, and more recently, his work displays visible brushwork that animates solid-color areas while introducing gestural passages of lighter-colored lines.

Curves, angles and arcs delineate most of the 15 works that were on view in a selection that covered a period of 28 years. Okada was based in Seattle in the 1950s and '60s and was later a professor of art at the University of Oregon. He died of lung cancer in 2000 at the age of 69. All of the paintings included in the exhibition are from the artist's estate.

Rarely using more than two or three colors in a given painting, Okada approached each work as an intuitive formal exercise employing color to stretch space. When not making all-white paintings (composed of many different colors that "lead" to white) such as Fog Dog (1977) and AX-IX (1981), Okada favored a palette of black with vivid primary colors. He applied paint with extremely small, uniformly sized brush marks across the entire picture plane. These strokes, while secondary, support and form each overall shape, activating and enriching the surfaces with tactile values.

A few of his paintings, like The Wandering Pole (1974-75), IOU-VII (1983) and M, B & B (1992), have overlapping areas where a shallow Cubist space is implied behind a larger geometric shape, usually at the upper or lower edge of the canvas.

Designed to create a quiet, meditative effect rather than an overwhelming gestalt, the works in this exhibition forced the viewer to unravel the cumulative process of the brushwork, appreciating the details that add up to the larger, abstract whole of the finished painting. Consistently using a rectangular canvas Okada steered a middle ground; not completely expressionistic; never merely geometric. His pre, mature death prevented his full exploration of the new tondo format he was working with when he died. In C-1-00 (2000) and a few related studies, Okada broke free of the rectangle and used a circular canvas to depict a vibrant red circle surrounded by areas of cobalt blue, black, white and yellow.

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