We all enjoyed finger painting as kids, even though it wasn’t always clear whether the art wound up on the canvas, the floor or one’s hands.

Mary Mitsuda has taken finger painting to high art, and has found the uncertainty factor to be part of the process. Her work is on display in "Moment: Paintings by Mary Mitsu­da," in the Hono­lulu Museum of Art’s First Hawaiian Center first-floor gallery space.

Rather than using a brush to apply acrylics to the canvas, Mitsuda said the paints are "manipulated by my hand, in a combination of finger painting and then using these rubber scrapers or whatever’s handy." 

"I feel like when I use these other things like my hand or a rubber scraper, I get these effects that are sort of large and mysterious. They’re somewhat controlled, but they’re also kind of a toss-of-a-dice kind of thing. I sort of look for the unpredictable, and I like to work with that."

One series of paintings, which depicts amorphous white shapes against a deep blue background, started in her mind as pieces of paper drifting in water, representing those little moments in life that come and go. They’re what Mitsuda calls the "ephemera" of life, which is what she named the series.

Observers, however, had different ideas of her images, and fortunately, they didn’t clash with hers.

"So many people saw icebergs that I saw icebergs, too. It was such a great association," she said, "Ephemera is this stuff that kind of floats through your life.

"They definitely saw icebergs more than paper, and so I started to go more with that, because it has a big presence when it’s a mass. And this whole thing of being from here (in Hawaii), and then those icebergs way up north are part of the ocean, and we’re connected to that."

She parallels her finger-painting technique with calligraphy. "It’s a recording of your gesture, and some gestures are more interesting than others," she said. "And sort of like calligraphy, there’s only so much you can do to ‘fix’ it. At a certain point, you just have to go for it, and if you don’t like it, you have to sand it all off and start all over again."

Mitsuda uses a variety of techniques to create other effects, and in some cases, gravity is her partner. She’ll load a brush full of paint, drag it across a straight edge, then let the globules of paint track down toward the bottom of the canvas in a haphazard way. Other paintings suggest paint being scraped off a wall, revealing hidden figures underneath.

Though the work is obviously abstract, Mitsuda doesn’t see it that way.

"It’s sort of like the drips, they are drips, but for me, they’re things that everyone has seen, so that in itself makes it very accessible.

"The state of abstraction, of going into this kind of daydreamlike mode, I think that is very much what my paintings are and what I like them to be. I like them to be a space that you go to and the painting kind of disappears. You enter it and it becomes like a venue. … It triggers a mental state."

Also on display in First Hawaiian Center’s second-floor galleries are works by two Hawaii island artists, Elroy Juan and Margaret Barnaby.

Juan’s display, "Hue Wai Pawehe: New Art from Ancient Techniques," comprises a series of gourds that he grew and decorated using traditional Hawaiian techniques. The Hamakua native’s lineage as the son of a basket weaver and net- and lei-maker are apparent in the elaborately decorated gourds, which have patterns carved into them and are then dyed.

Barnaby is a former jewelry-maker who now makes woodblock prints. The native New Englander grew up seeing a lot of crows, leading to her current interest in the alala, a Hawaiian species of crow. Her carefully produced prints, made from multiple woodblocks to apply layers of color, produce vibrant forest settings for the brooding black bird.