Frank Okada

"At the beginning of his career, Okada received a series of prominent fellowships - John Hay Whitney in 1957, Fulbright in 1959, and Guggenheim in 1966-67. He was greatly influenced by the artists he met and was a close observer of the art scenes in New York, Paris, and Kyoto in an effort to find his own style of painting and how to be a painter. He began teaching painting at the University of Oregon in 1969, a tenure that lasted thirty years. His work from the seventies, eighties, and nineties balanced forms and colors in intensely worked surfaces. The color blocks gradually became more intellectually structured and his compositions more expressive as he made his colors more powerful. As Nakane notes, without recognizable reference to nature or his own personality, he created a texture that brought light to a field of color. The build-up of color dots underneath and extensive small textural stories across large canvases made progress slow.