Kenneth Baker -  San Francisco Chronicle - Galleries - 02/07/09

     East Bay painter Patrick O'Kiersey has slowly transplanted his life to Hawaii in recent years. To complete the transition, he needs only to finish building a studio there to replace the Oakland work space he has occupied for 25 years. The survey of his work at Triangle thus figures as a sort of valedictory exhibition.
     O'Kiersey has long practiced a nearly abstract expressionism with deep roots in the Bay Area. As his titles indicate, observations of forest growth and light lie behind many of his paintings.  "Red Forest" (2004) offers a definitive example of O'Kiersey's approach at a pitch of confidence and verve marking how far he has come since the ingratiating but comparatively timid "Near the River" (1986).
     We will never know by looking at "Red Forest" how much planning, time or revision it entailed. But whatever it took, O'Kiersey finally left a powerful impression of directness, spontaneity and coherence, and made it look easy.
     Minus its title, "Red Forest" could pass as a full-throated exercise in abstraction, as might several other pictures in the show. But as the words "Red Forest" work on your imagination, the painting suddenly starts to insinuate memories of light breaking through a canopy of trees, of red and green foliage competing for attention, of bright, broken clouds or a churn of rapids.
     Yet O'Kiersey keeps the literal at bay in most of his paintings, in contrast to some of the charcoal drawings. The references to volcanoes in a few recent pieces complicate further the impact of the crimson explosion that tops off "Red Forest," suggesting the sort of overlay of landscape memories that the painter must have experienced shuttling between island and mainland worlds.