In a group of ten artists represented by this gallery, is the work of four well known Western painters; Ralph du Casse and Arthur Okamura of San Francisco, Carl Morris of Washington and Douglas Snow of Utah. In his current work du Casse has affected soft edged lozenges, lounging in a pleasant white void, as his “solution” to the cubist problem (believed by J. J. Sweeney, formerly of the Guggenheim Museum, to have been handled very well indeed.) Carl Morris has achieved the indigenous gloomy, potentially moving, color tonality associated with Pacific Northwest art, but marred his painting with tediously textured, rectilinear forms floating in textured space. Douglas Snow’s abstract Western landscapes have been updated in a new (for him) emphasis on a horizontally-striped structure. Arthur Okamura exhibits, instead of beautifully facile, anglo-oriental, vaguely symbolic, abstractions of utmost diffident appeal, drawings that make one say “Remember how good drawings used to be? Well, Arthur’s still are . . . sometimes, Carl’s too.” One thing these artists have in common is a rather comfortable amount of notoriety and success, and the sincere concern of several, brilliant fellow artists who wonder when the above four will genuinely “make it.”
––Walter Hopps
