Art: Pictures of Dreams

Kenzo Okada has—at the age of 60—a secret, invisible, inexhaustible and almost magic source of images for his painting: memories of his dreams when he was young. He seems to have forgotten most of his wakeful activities—instead he recalls that in Tokyo his life “was lonely and full of dreams,” and during his student days in Paris, “I fell in love with a different girl every day, and mostly I dreamed.” Last week a collection of Okada’s dreams was on display at M.I.T.’s Hayden Library in Cambridge, Mass. In style and approach, Okada has changed little over the last decade, but happily this is all for the best. His abstractions have been and are today among the most beautiful in the U.S.

Before he came to the U.S. in 1950, Okada derived his forms from landscapes and figures: “I worked with the object.” But for a man who ultimately decided that he wanted to paint the interior of his own mind, the object merely inhibited the necessary flight of fancy. And so Okada turned to abstraction, which he calls “the Western way” but his Western way still keeps the flavor of Japan.

When he and his wife Kimi are not in their Greenwich Village apartment, they are apt to be in their old frame house in rural Rensselaerville, 28 miles from Albany. “It is just like Japan,” says Okada. “The moors, the quiet, unhurried countryside. We even have a waterfall in front.”

Kimi was once a dress designer, but when she ventures to make suggestions about her husband’s designs, Okada becomes jokingly stern. “When Kimi tries to help, she helps too much,” says he, making his thumb and forefingers snap open and shut to suggest a yacketing mouth.

Okada works on as many as five canvases at a time, wandering from one to another in bare feet. He uses knives, fingers, pieces of wood, rollers, “and, of course, I also have brushes.” When he has “a feeling of one of my dreams,” he begins to paint. He has no advance knowledge of how his canvas should come out, and thus his composition can grow naturally. “Without knowing is the best way to create something,” he says.

Often an Okada painting will suggest a bit of landscape or sky, but sometimes, as in Memories, the images simply float across the canvas like some sort of exquisite flotsam. In the last five years, Okada’s palette has grown increasingly muted, and his colors have a weathered look as if time had washed over them again and again, giving them that frail grace that comes only with great age. Nothing is consciously organized; it is Okada’s achievement that, in the end, everything still seems in place. This is the chaotic logic of a remotely remembered dream.