A must-see retrospective of Harry Tsuchidana’s paintings and drawings, at the Honolulu Museum of Art First Hawaiian Center, spans 60 years of the artist’s ongoing career: According to museum curator Jay Jensen, the Waipahu-born artist shows no signs of slowing down as he pursues his daily practice into his 80s.

Work completed this year shows the same assertive explorations of color, stroke, composition and form as pieces he made in the late 1950s. This show offers the rare privilege to see how an artist’s earliest decisions, strategies and approaches can weave their way through an entire career.

The results are powerful and engaging. Tsuchidana’s abstract works can be read at the broadest levels where he evokes landscapes, bristling energetic fields, figures, calligraphy and the surreal fireworks one sees when pressing firmly on one’s own closed eyelids. But it is also important to take the closest possible look to see the elemental, almost atomic gestures that accumulate to achieve their overall effects.

Thematically, this collection can be viewed as falling into three broad categories: the imposing rectangles of his “stage” paintings; the puzzlelike interlocking forms of “Random” or “Beauty Contest”; and the gestural explorations of his “Dance” series. Unifying them throughout is the profound control Tsuchidana exerts over his brush and the colors he applies with it.

One can also see hybrid approaches, such as “Chaos” and “Merging,” both of which represent fusions of the three categories taken from very different perspectives.

“Chaos” is a black-and-white conte crayon and graphite drawing featuring a storm of loose lines interacting with harsh clusters of lines and arcs. An underlying tempera wash and varied densities of closely drawn lines create different territories in the piece. Dark areas of geometric stability offset chaotic areas of organic loops and curls.

If one can appreciate a crowd of tree limbs unpredictably swaying and overlapping in a breeze, one can recognize the underlying order Tsuchidana creates — this is the idea of chaos, not chaos itself.

Similar approaches to line and form are demonstrated in nature-themed (and gently opposed) pieces such as “Dispersal” and “Captured.” These more painterly works done in casein, a milk-based medium, can be interpreted in terms of the structures, processes and concepts that emerge from chaos — which brings us to “Merging.”

This 40-by-60-inch oil painting is divided into two zones: a narrow horizontal strip of white-and-blue rectangular forms and a dominant field of hundreds of interlocking puzzlelike shapes. This field is as dark as heavy storm clouds, subdivided by two columns of red, yellow, green and blue patches that are individually blended into the background color across a gradient of lighter grays.

From a distance one gets a sense of emergence, of change blooming in monotony and polygonal diversity overcoming four-cornered rigidity. But look closely! Every shape in the work is made from discrete, parallel brushstrokes whose colors have been selected with great precision so as to achieve the seamless fade from one to the other. Think of the brushstrokes as you might think of pixels in a digital image, or the pointillism of Seurat or Van Gogh. The order of the overall painting emerges from the chaos of minute interactions.

And so pieces like “Random” seem to be born from “Merging,” creating multicolored order by emphasizing contrast and eroding boundaries via gradients. And the “stage” paintings reveal subtle lines of “chaos” between their carefully ordered zones of verticality. Links and genealogies such as these are everywhere in the show for those who are willing to take the time to look.

Where retrospectives of other artists with long careers might show leaps between genre, medium and subject matter, Tsuchidana has chosen to bob and weave through his iterative explorations of structure and form. His consistency emerges from a complete mastery of color as an expressive language, a stunning capacity for patience and precision in his brushstrokes, and an ability to abstract the power and deep organization of organic forms.

He has learned so very much in his career and has much to teach us.