My first gallery encounter with artist Arthur Okamura came at his one-man painting show two years ago when, unannounced, he began performing a series of his celebrated "pantry" tricks. Over lots of artsy chitchat from a crowd ogling his Bolinas seascapes, a loud whirring noise began echoing off the warehouse walls of the Braunstein/Quay Gallery. In a corner, Okamura had been patiently filing the hook of an elongated wire coat hanger. With a penny balanced on this flat, pinpoint surface, he began spinning the upside-down hanger, as centrifugal force kept the coin in place. Gradually, the audience began to grasp the wonder of this gravity-defying feat. As people circled around Okamura, the room fell silent. Next came what I'd call his Aluminum Recycling Act of 2001: The artist balanced himself, cranelike, with one foot on top of an empty soda can. Dropping his hands, he tapped its sides and, presto, the Tower of Sprite collapsed with an embarrassed, crinkling squash. Then, with dollar bills solicited from the throng, origami master Okamura created designer bow ties and wedding rings.
Monet in His Garden #8.
Details
Through Nov. 29
Admission is free
278-9850
www.bquayartgallery.com
Braunstein/Quay Gallery, 430 Clementina
(between Howard and Folsom), S.F.
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All this transpired in about the time it would take you to chalk a cue stick, take a sip of beer, and slam a break shot at the pool table in Smiley's Bar in Bolinas -- which is where, late in the afternoon, you're likely to find this author of The Paper Propeller, The Spinning Quarter, The Jumping Frog and 38 Other Amazing Tricks You Can Do With Stuff Lying Around the House. He writes that most of the gags "require the simplest of materials and things that are commonly at hand. Unlike 'magic tricks,' they do not require deception, nor is there any need to keep them secret. They can be shown and shared with others, and passed on, as they were to me." This is only slightly disingenuous, as you discover when you try to master them yourself, but it aptly reflects the spirit of a new one-man show of Okamura's artwork at Braunstein/Quay. There's plenty of visual magic to be found here.
The show is Okamura's first exhibition of small paintings and monoprints ever. His recent pieces were inspired by travels to Europe and Hawaii and by his ongoing meditations, walking his dog Coco along the Bolinas shoreline. Abstract and representational elements work hand in glove in Okamura's images, with a heavy reliance on accident and spontaneity. This method is most apparent in a series of monotype portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Monet, loosely based on photographs the artist found lying around the house.
In the monoprint Monet in His Garden #8, Okamura has imagined the bearded impressionist master of Giverny on a Sunday, his day off from painting, attired in a three-piece suit and straw hat and chain-smoking. Monet stands in the foreground of a serpentine garden path, delineated with the loose, swirling curves typical of Okamura's animated line. The background is a riot of marks: an invented childlike script, rainbow arcs, and thick scribbles -- a draftsman's impressionism or some wild Zen calligraphy. The ensemble of lines suggests a musical score composed on hallucinogens and reveals the playful impulsiveness at the core of Okamura's art. The crumpled paper he uses as a canvas for Matisse and Picasso II adds other accidental effects of texture and line.
Born in Long Beach, Okamura spent part of his World War II childhood in a Colorado concentration camp for Japanese families. In his early teens he moved to Chicago, where he worked after school in a silk-screen shop run by old lefties and union organizers. There he aspired to be a magazine illustrator like Norman Rockwell, and designed campaign ties for Progressive candidates such as Henry Wallace before beginning studies at the Art Institute. As an illustrator, he first felt hostile to most abstract modern art, but his tastes changed the more he was exposed to it. A traveling fellowship brought him to Paris in 1954, where he arrived to read newspaper headlines announcing Matisse's death. He was pleased and astonished to be in a country where the death of an abstract painter would make national headlines. Okamura credits poet Robert Creeley, whom he met in 1955 in Majorca, for helping him to explore the idea of spontaneous expression in his painting. Creeley introduced him to jazz great Charlie Parker and the Black Mountain school of artists and writers.
Okamura applied their improvisatory ideas and methods to his own work. Monoprints, for example, are typically etched or put through a press, but Okamura's process is far more simplified and aleatory. He rolls black oil paint onto a glass pane, places lightweight paper on top of this surface, and with various drawing tools (his fingers, an Afro comb, hand pressure) creates the marks, textures, and impressions that delineate the image. The result, he tells me, depends as much on accidents -- even dust on the surface of the glass -- as on the fact that he improvises upon his photographic sources by viewing them upside down. Drawing from an inverted image, he believes, helps him see the face abstractly, accenting its forms, shapes, and lines -- a lesson he brought to his students at the California College of the Arts, where he taught for nearly 40 years.
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