Arthur Okamura

Arthur Okamura (1932-2009) was a distinguished Japanese American artist whose long career established him as one of the notable voices within the vibrant California art community of the postwar era. Known especially for his screen printing and abstract expressionist paintings, Okamura rose to prominence in the 1960s as both a book illustrator and a central member of the artistic community based in the coastal town of Bolinas, California, where he would live and work for much of his mature life.

Okamura's artistic training was unusually broad and rigorous. He pursued his formal education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the most respected American art academies, and continued his studies at an art seminar at Yale University as well as at the University of Chicago. This wide-ranging intellectual and artistic foundation gave him the technical range and cross-disciplinary sensibility that would inform his mature practice at every level. He worked primarily in California for much of his career, and he was an important figure within the West Coast art scene during the extraordinary decades of its postwar flowering.

Okamura's mature practice moved through a number of distinct stylistic phases, and his willingness to explore different approaches over the years reflected his fundamental commitment to genuine artistic investigation rather than to any single signature look. Whether working in abstraction or in more directly representational modes, he demonstrated an intuitive understanding of how the medium of abstraction, in the hands of a sensitive artist, can intensify the feelings one wants to convey. A simple observed idea such as a wave or a passage of light could be transformed through his work into something that felt sublimely larger and more resonant than its original source. This capacity for expressive transformation defines his best pictures.

Okamura earned his living for many years as an art professor and teacher, mentoring generations of California artists over the course of a distinguished academic career. His list of exhibitions and awards throughout his lifetime is highly impressive, and his paintings and prints are held in significant American museum and private collections. He is remembered today as a serious and thoughtful artist whose sustained engagement with the possibilities of contemporary painting produced a distinguished body of work.