IF YOU WERE encountering Linda Okazaki’s paintings for the first time, and knew little of her life, what might you see in them?

You might notice the water—streams, lakes, seas, and what look like enormous baths. “Water for me is like the sky for other painters,” she says, with shapes and colors that can be chosen to reflect a mood or complete a composition. Water is the ultimate shapeshifter, even morphing into human form over eons. For a painter of stories, that makes it the most fluid of metaphors, signifying everything from the womb that bears life to the river crossed to we know not where.

Okazaki’s color stands out, too, for its vividness and luminescence. Joyful colors play against sober themes while darker ones intensify the solemn notes. Okazaki is a lifelong student of color, particularly the myriad ways in which it conveys emotion. She wrote her master’s thesis on a 19th century theory of color that still informs her work.

Birds are prominent, especially crows and ravens. These, too, are metaphorically rich figures that appear in the oldest myths and stories, including among Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives. Other creatures turn up as well, such as fish, dogs (in one case, a specific dog), cats, and coyotes. They, too, are story carriers.

You might observe that many of her paintings depict a woman, sometimes clothed, sometimes nude, who appears to be part of a larger story. She is swimming outdoors or reclining indoors or up in the sky and often accompanied by birds or other animals. Occasionally there are other people in the paintings, including a few historical artists with whom she imagines dialogues in her journal. The figures are drawn expertly but not realistically or proportionally, and usually in shallow perspective.

The water, the colors, the birds, and the woman—all are imbued with emotion. They comprise a story that is just beyond our grasp, like a dream. You might suppose, correctly, that many of the images come from dreams, and that the woman in the dreams, like most of us, is trying to work something out.

LINDA OKAZAKI WAS BORN and has lived most of her life in Washington state. Though her father was often absent, she spent her first six years with an adventurous and loving mother who brushed her daughter’s hair every day. That ended tragically one night when, in the next room, a man shot her mother to death and then killed himself. As an adult, Okazaki has painted the scene. On two paintings, she wrote out the entire police report along the bottom. In one, her mother rises as an apparition to comfort the girl.

That event, and subsequent difficulties she faced as a child and young woman, color her paintings. Without the affection and guidance she had once relied upon, she developed a rich interior life. She read, she dreamed, and she drew. Drawing “just felt good” and she was good at it. She sought out novels and poems that explored the textures of experience absent from her life in austere homes and small towns. Her grandmother, who raised her through elementary school, attended the Church of Christ twice or more each week. Like her mother, Okazaki felt more hampered than enlightened by the church, though drawn to Biblical stories.

Okazaki excelled in school and in1965 entered Pepperdine University in Los Angeles with a full scholarship. That year, nearby Watts exploded into violence and filled the air with smoke from burning buildings. Unhappy with the city, she returned to eastern Washington after her freshman year, first matriculating to a state college in Cheney and then to Washington State University in Pullman, where she graduated in 1971.

The Palouse, where WSU is located, is a picturesque landscape composed of low rolling hills and wheat fields. Pullman, population 30,000, is the largest town. Yet in the late 1960s, this lonely outpost became the unlikely home to an ambitious and tightly knit community of artists. Without the distractions of a large city, notes Bob Haft, who was in the art department with Okazaki, “We just went to the studio and worked.” After graduation, she married a WSU professor, photographer Arthur Okazaki. In 1973, she entered the MFA program and the following year their son Miles was born.

DURING THE YEARS when Okazaki was a student and teacher at WSU, several of the Pullman artists were influenced by a movement on the west coast known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement or California Funk. At a time when New York and Abstract Expressionism still dominated the art world, western Funk artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Roy DeForest, and William T. Wiley re-introduced figurative painting that was personal, boldly colorful, and full of irreverent humor. Several had connections to Washington and the Pullman artists. Wiley was friends and played music with artists Jo and Jim Hockenhull. DeForest had taught at Yakima Valley College with Gaylen Hansen, one of Okazaki’s painting teachers at WSU, and in1966 he introduced him to Thiebaud, Wiley, ceramicist Robert Arneson, and underground cartoonist R. Crumb. The “Summer of Love” in San Francisco was just a year away. The Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests had set the stage for the counterculture, which energized creative movements in music, performance, art, and design, and nowhere more so than in the West.

Also in 1966, Ed Keinholz, a friend of WSU faculty artist Robert Helm, aroused indignation and acclaim with his assemblage, Back Seat Dodge ‘38, shown at the Los Angeles County Art Museum. The piece, which Okazaki saw while at Pepperdine, was constructed from a junked automobile and showed a couple making love in the back seat. Ed and Nancy Keinholz, who collaborated on the widely exhibited assemblages after 1972, bought a home in nearby Hope, Idaho, and made several visits to Pullman.

Later, WSU ceramicist Patrick Siler organized pig roasts and raku workshops with visiting California artists and Ken Cory, a jewelry artist from California College of Arts and Crafts, joined the Pullman group. Interweaving with the vibrant Funk and countercultural scenes of the West reinforced the feeling in Pullman that something important was crystalizing there. And indeed, it was, launching other notable northwestern artists in Okazaki’s orbit, including Robert Ecker, Suzanne Lamon, Frank Samuelson, and Ray Troll.

LINDA OKAZAKI HAS KEPT a personal photograph of another California visitor, Joan Brown, a San Francisco artist considered part of the “second wave” of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, and an inspiration for the younger artist. Brown’s subjects were her life: her love of swimming, her romantic engagements, and motherhood. Okazaki also met and admired artist Fay Jones, a Washington-based figurative artist, and both were represented by the Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle.

By the 1970s, the Women’s Movement was ascendant. Ms. magazine featured Okazaki in an early article, “Painters of the Palouse,” and critic Lucy Lippard, a champion of feminist art, followed with an essay in Art in America. One of only two women in the WSU department (the other was Jo Hockenhull), she struggled to balance the demands of a family while painting and teaching. She had finished her MFA in 1975 when Miles was a year old. As a graduate student teacher and later assistant professor in the department, she taught painting, drawing, design, and color theory. Okazaki also initiated, designed, and taught Women in Art: A Historical Survey of Women Artists from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century. The course is still offered at WSU.

At the same time, she was determined that Miles would have the affection and stability her childhood lacked. Miles remembers wildly drawing on rolls of butcher paper while watching her perfect small details of her paintings. Now a jazz musician in New York, he reflects on her challenges navigating the male-centric environment that prevailed. Working in watercolor, condescendingly considered a woman’s medium, she honed technical skills to give it the precision and crisp lines her vision required and to command the respect she deserved. “She made art to survive,” he says, by which he means, “the sustenance, the impulse to make things that enable you to live, to build a world that you can understand.”

Okazaki maintained a rigorous teaching schedule through 1979, but her marriage was failing. The following year, the couple divorced, and she moved with Miles to Port Townsend, a sleepy mill town revived by artists, musicians, and craftspeople who converged there in the 70s and shared a sensibility, if not a singular style. In the tradition of Pacific Northwest tribal culture, local artists, woodworkers, and metalworkers were devoted to fine craftsmanship. During the decade, Port Townsend established a Wooden Boat Festival, a nationally acclaimed poetry press, and Centrum, which hosts a series of music, writing, and art workshops that is now in its fiftieth year. Miles learned to play jazz there.

The emphasis on craft suited Okazaki. Samuelson, who also lives in Port Townsend, extols her masterful drawing skill. She found her place in the local art scene and within a year had met and married an engineer and homebuilder, Ray Weber, with whom she had two more children, Luke and Eva. When the couple purchased a piece of land overlooking a lagoon and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, she insisted that he build her studio first, before the house.

OKAZAKI’S STUDIO, where she has worked every available day for the past four decades, is today surrounded by gardens tended by Ray. Natural light pours from the high ceiling. Though spacious, every square inch is accounted for. On a working surface next to the door is a large color grid on paper­­. Tiny writing beneath each color square denotes its paint formula. A single easel with an oil painting sits on the far side of the room, next to neatly organized brushes and tubes. Poetry and art books line the shelves.

Birds in Flight, a five-foot-wide watercolor painting that Okazaki has been finessing for months lies on the main table. The work is part of a suite of paintings entitled The Valley of Love in Birdland, which was inspired by a Persian Sufi poet from the 12th century. A few years ago, she began composing on an iPad, which enables her to size and move figures before committing them to watercolor. Birds in Flight, like others in the series, is set in a location from an earlier painting, Dream at Salt Creek (1998). Birds fly over a blue river that runs through a forest of parallel trees. A large Hoopoe with its striking crown of orange-and-black, a familiar figure in Egyptian myth, is on the left. Most of the painting’s birds are of the Northwest, including a flicker, blue and white herons, and crows. The leader is a white raven. Ravens are tricksters in several Native American myths and the rare white ravens hold special powers. In one story, it brings humans fire, whose soot then blackens its feathers. Okazaki, who is pale-skinned and sensitive to the sun, identifies with the white bird.

The Red Table (2019) dominates the studio’s back wall. In some of her later paintings, tables perform the color and compositional roles of water. The Red Table has the vibrant energy of an Henri Matisse painting during his Fauvist period. Okazaki has long studied artists inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s color theories of the early 19th century—the subject of her thesis—including Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and J.W.T. Turner, whose paintings she revisited on a recent trip to New York. (She has sketched paintings in museums since 1965.) While Isaac Newton famously used prisms to reveal color as a physical quality of light, Goethe was eager to advance human-centered explanations. He believed that certain colors and color combinations evoke human emotions and he attempted to catalog them. In that vein, Kandinsky posited that blue, like the body of water at the top of The Red Table, evokes a spiritual calm, while yellow is associated with unsettled feelings. The centerpiece on The Red Table is a bright yellow plate with mussels and shrimp surrounding an organic shape that could be a woman’s vagina or perhaps an oyster-shaped porthole to the sea. Okazaki chooses allegorical figures based in literature or dreams or personal experiences and they often carry multiple or ambiguous meanings. An allusion to death sits at the lower right of The Red Table in the form of a ghost dog, a reference to her mother’s Basenji and, for the Egyptians, a trickster, shapeshifter, and protective spirit for the journey across the river.

IDEAS FROM THE Pullman and California artists that inspired Okazaki in the 1970s remain present in her work. The revival of western figurative painting was refreshing at a time when New York abstraction dominated the art world. Against intellectual sobriety, these artists indulged humor and absurdity. Some celebrated the western landscape and wildlife as well as Native American cultures.

Okazaki absorbed the figurative, allegorical, and personal elements of early mentors, and her art references regional iconography. But it arguably displays greater existential depth. Over the most vibrantly colorful of scenes, the shadow of death is present. Though not overtly feminist, the emotional courage of her paintings resonates with other women. And her skill as a painter, honed by intellectual curiosity, devotion to color, and a lifelong study of other artists’ ideas and methods, past and present, elevates her art. Okazaki’s masterful marriage of personal vision to high craft renders this retrospective a welcome recognition of an important American artist from the Pacific Northwest.

Kerry Tremain is a writer, photographer, founding president of Northwind Art, and former editor of California and Mother Jones magazines. His latest book is Aves: Photographs of Birds. He lives in Port Townsend with his wife, fiber artist Barbara Ramsey.