Kenneth Baker, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, has followed O'Kiersey's work for many years. Below are excerpts from some of his reviews.

from Galleries, “Major Works” at Triangle

O’Kiersey’s “Near Poison Oak” (1986) hovers thrillingly between landscape painting and an all-out exercise in abstract expressionism. It looks as fresh as when Triangle first showed it more than fifteen years ago.

San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, September 1st, 2004

from Galleries, Painter Speaks in Oakland

More than half a century ago, improvisational abstract painters discovered that their techniques amplified certain truths about their art: that every painting entails a performance, that to paint means to decorate a surface and that, at this point in its history, their medium radiates expressiveness unbidden.

No wonder that painters such as Oaklander, Patrick O’Kiersey, still find this mode of work fruitful.

San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, June 22, 2004

from Galleries

"Patrick O'Kiersey's first solo show at Triangle Gallery, 47 Kearny St. (through July 27, 1991), includes several splendid paintings.

Two solid pictures from 1987, "Park Scene" and "In the Woods", flank the gallery entrance. Without their titles, the landscape inspiration of these abstractions, which are thickets of fat knife strokes, might go unrecognized.

"In the Woods" is daring in being flush with hot yellow, a difficult color to control. O'Kiersey cools it down just enough with mossy greens and one stroke of opaque blue.

When you probe these paintings for intimations of landscape, they start to flicker with notations of sunlight, of branches and chinks of cool, shadowy, empty space. Passages that might describe light-shot voids are as thick with pigment as those that seem to correspond to solid surfaces. The painting throughout is so buoyantly done that it always brings you back to the canvas surface, where the real energy and the only definite pictorial bearings are."

San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, July 20, 1991

from Galleries

"The Abstractions of Bay Area painter Patrick O'Kiersey typically originate in directly observed drawings of landscape. The Triangle gallery, 47 Kearny St. is currently showing a handsome selection of O'Kiersey's charcoal drawings (through Oct 2, 1993) (The gallery has a couple of his paintings on hand that may be viewed on request.)

O'Kiersey's drawings are squarely within the Bay Area tradition of landscape imagery."The Light of Day", for example, with its rough tree forms and sharp shadows calls to mind some early drawings by Elmer Bischoff. "Solid Lake-Into the Abyss" and one or two very dark pieces recall the dusk-light landscapes of Louis Siegriest.

But O'Kirsey's best sheets achieve more than description. "Between the Lines", for example is so true to the effect of waning light on barren terrain that it is all but reduced to a mute display of charcoal.

Here and in "Variations", O'Kiersey almost blackens the page. Yet he strikes a tricky balance that lets us see landscape features one moment; the next, a seemingly empty shimmer of shifting textures that is, in essence, the material and technique of charcoal."

San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, Sept 17, 1993

from Galleries

"Were they hanging in New York or Los Angeles, the pictures by Oakland painter Patrick O'Kiersey at the Triangle Gallery would be inspected for irony.

In the Bay Area, however, a lower level of cynicism prevails. The possibility of painting sincerely, as O'Kiersey does, is still respected.

The small roomful of charcoal drawings here is the key to O'Kiersey's method. He seeks out isolated landscapes and draws them, often when daylight is failing, with a rough touch that produces shadowy patterns of light and dark.

Some of the drawings become starting points for the paintings, such as the show's crowning effort, "Red Rocks" (1992).

This picture flickers between being an abstraction of deep reds streaked with pale blue and being a late day view upward to empty sky from behind a butte, inside a shallow canyon. The painting's ambiguity may not be original but it is remarkable in its perfect poise and color tuning.

At least as daring, if not quite as resolved, is "Islands in the Evening Sky" (1992), a big painting slagged with more violet than any other I can remember seeing. The way O'Kiersey's paint handling withholds the image heightens nicely the picture's intimation of twilight withdrawing rapidly from rocky western terrain.

The third winner here is "Bright Needles" (1992), which evokes high afternoon sunlight on landscape with heaps of hot yellow and orange, cooled by streaks of blue, lavender and viridian.

O'Kiersey trowels paint and pushes it around with results that recall Nicholas De Stael and Pierre Soulages. He walks the cliff's edge of kitsch and stumbles often but when he keeps his balance, as in "Red Rocks", you feel like applauding."

San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, Oct 6, 1995

Winston Branch has exhibited his paintings internationally for many years. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and he won a Prix de Rome. He has taught at the Slade School in London and was an adjunct professor of art at U.C. Berkeley in 2002. Below are excerpts from a short essay he wrote about O'Kiersey's exhibition at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, ( May 13 - June 29, 2004).

Patrick O'Kiersey, an American Painter
Patrick O'Kiersey's paintings were first brought to my attention when I curated the inaugural exhibition at the Joyce Gordon Gallery in September of 2003. The paintings are abstract and deal with an esthetic of mid 20th century modernism. We have to think of a Midwestern child growing up in Chicago during the 40's and 50's. Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollack and John Steinbeck. The world was about to change. The atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The task of the painter was to express his medium, the purest expression of the substance of paint.

...but if non-figurative painting shall survive, it must look beyond the harsh and spatially limited world of Pollock and the formally amorphous early Kandinsky. We must look to the quieter American painters of that generation: Rothko, Motherwell and Still. Out of abstract expressionism's strident freedoms must grow structure of classical weight and beauty. The profound consideration must be permitted to glow where only the rawness of the spontaneous had been allowed...

I visited Patrick O'Kiersey's studio in Oakland, Ca. where he has worked for over 20 years. It was originally a WWII era Movietone newsreel theater near Pill Hill. He talked about his experiences at Mills College. Jay DeFeo seems to be a lasting influence. He mentioned three earlier teachers, Tony Phillips (SAIC), Lenny Silverberg (CCAC) and Julius Hatofsky (S.F. Art Institute) as friends and mentors. Looking at his paintings, the feelings that I derive from them are those of a committed artist whose manner is reticent and slightly eccentric. As he brought out paintings, his rolling, bouncing gait smacked more of a seaman out for a night on the town than a man of the brush.

...O'Kiersey has always been a good painter. This present work can be legitimately described as more conservative than some of his earlier abstract paintings. Yet in no sense does it make a retrenchment. It represents a substitution of authority and self-control for willful originality as standards of quality. O'Kiersey is now a world-class painter.

Winston Branch