Frank Okada's canvases of shape and color strangely intriguing

The art of the late Eugene painter Frank Okada shows what can be accomplished with little more than a great sense of color and design, some big canvases, a lot of oil paint and an obsessive attention to detail. It's that last part that first grabs you when you visit a new show of Okada's paintings at the White Lotus Gallery, where they will be on exhibit through Sept. 11.

Okada, a professor of art at the University of Oregon who died in 2000, was known for his hard-work ethic. He would rise at 4 a.m. and then paint until noon, always scheduling his classes after noon to protect that studio time. Then he would teach and come home and paint some more. Apparently what he was doing during all those hours in the studio was making very careful brush marks on very large canvases. A 1980 painting in the White Lotus Show, "Small, White & Gray," consists, at first glance, entirely of rectangular areas of white - the classic white-on-white painting to which abstract expressionism ultimately devolved in its search for ever greater aesthetic purity.

But Okada's whites, of course, aren't quite the same color white. They don't have the same brushed surfaces. And, on closer examination, they aren't even pure white at all, but are saturated with tiny glimpses of reds and blues, little flecks of vibrant energy in this cool sea of calm.

``Small White & Gray'' is a small painting. Okada, though, often worked large. ``W&B II'' - his titles are a little obscure at times, and it's not clear what this means - is very large, nearly 8 feet wide, and features little more that a giant field of warm brown. But the surface once again simply shimmers with the artist's intricate brushwork, worked into daubs of paint as thick as toothpaste. Stand back and you're looking at color fields. Stand closer and the color breaks into mesmerizing life and texture. Stand very close, nose to the painting, and you practically peer into the foundations of vision itself.

I never knew Okada, but I think he must have been a madman. He was a jazz aficionado, and a black and white photograph with the exhibit shows him sitting in his studio, centered between racks of perfectly arranged jazz CDs on one shelf and perfectly arranged tubes of paint on another. The photograph is as carefully composed as an Okada painting.

Okada worked even larger, creating canvases like this more than 10 feet wide. It could take him months of long days in the studio to finish a single painting, his intricate brush strokes repeating themselves in an endless but not identical sequence, like the improvised riffs on a long cerebral jazz recording.

With abstract painting, the question looms of emotional resonance. Shapes and colors can, in the wrong hands, just be shapes and colors. If there's nothing more to a work than simple geometry, you probably won't care to look at it for very long. Some abstract artists, though, are known for their emotional impact.

Mark Rothko's work, particularly, has been known to reduce viewers, inexplicably, to tears. While I doubt the White Lotus will be handing out tissues to gallery-goers this month, Okada's paintings - cool and unyielding at first glance - are indeed strangely moving on leisurely inspection.

Within their shimmering surfaces lies a vision that's tantalizing us, just out of conscious sight - and that is what pulls us back, again and again, for more.

Aug. 8, 2004