Hawai'i's loss has become California's gain.

After several years of living, working and exhibiting in Honolulu, painter Pia Stern has returned to California, where she has long been a favorite among Bay Area collectors.

Now living in San Diego, Stern is showing 15 recent oils and pastels at San Francisco's Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, a relatively new and impressive Geary Street space that provides an exquisite setting to Stern's precious gems.

Both the gallery and her exhibition are well worth a visit if a California vacation is in the offing.

Stern's influences at the University of California Berkeley, where she received both her master's of arts and fine arts degrees, were many of the artists who were at the center of what is now known as the Bay Area figurative movement, seminal artists such as David Park, Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn.

During the 1950s, a few abstract expressionist painters in the Bay Area began to stage personal, dramatic defections from the prevailing style, creating what would come to be known as Bay Area figurative art.

At the end of 1949, when New York painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and his fellow West Coast abstract expressionists had helped put the United States on the world art map, Park gathered a large number of his abstract paintings done over four years and trashed them at the city dump.

This sudden abandonment of abstract expressionism was the dramatic first step toward a completely personal statement, a new style using purposefully naive figure images, a path that Stern continues to explore in her highly personal way.

Soon Bischoff and Diebenkorn joined Park and other painters such as Nathan Oliveira, Theophilus Brown, James Weeks and Paul Wonner in the move away from abstraction and toward figurative subject matter.

When artists such as Bruce McGaw, Manuel Neri and Joan Brown emerged as a second generation of figurative artists, the momentum grew for a powerful new development in American painting. The achievement of Bay Area figurative artists has become directly relevant to current debates about abstraction and representation, as well as modernism and post-modernism.

The historical phenomenon of the movement is an important case study in the evolution of modernism in America, serving as an early example of rupture in the formalist "mainstream."

Stern's work, embedded within this historical context and tradition, is solidly her own, unique and astonishing.

Her textured and layered canvases — the paint always the subject, first and foremost, the terrifying blackness of unknowable space always suggested — are embedded with mysterious clues and potent symbols that hint at a rich, deeply felt psychological interior landscape.

Stern works intuitively, tapping into her subconscious, coaxing it out as do the greatest creative practitioners in all media.

Tellingly, this exhibition's first working title was "Inside Out."

She starts with a mark on the canvas, then responds to it. She avoids preconceived notions of what will happen on the canvas and instead trusts the process to lead her where it must go.

And where does it take her? Witness the intensity and mystery of "Immense Night."

Although we can see literal images of the night sky, a bicycle, an icy surface pock-marked with graffiti and hermetic markings, the rest is suggestive of a kind of beauty that is nothing but the beginning of terror, Rilke's terrifying angel that serenely disdains to annihilate us.

We are left in the end to absorb the energy of a barren planet, the dreamscape of some intensely disturbing yet utterly beatific vision.

Stern says of her work: "I am driven to find visual metaphors which express my awareness of the temporal nature of life, the many paradoxes I perceive and my overwhelming sense of awe."

"Chatter" speaks of these things with a palette that is at once subtle and insinuating, marked with petroglyphs, residue of a perhaps vanished civilization.

Or consider "Boogie Woogie."

We know that Park, like many visual artists, had an intense interest in music that ranged from Bach to jazz, that he was naturally drawn to the vigor and freedom of improvisational jazz and that he played piano in a band with other artists, including Bischoff.

Stern's work also invokes the jazz idiom as her circular black shapes seem to dance as they make their way toward an ecstatic union of conception.

But at the same time, we sense a dark presence behind the music, ready to engulf and annihilate, the feminine principle in the guise of creator and destroyer in equal measure.

Her more richly saturated pastels, grounded also in the still blackness of space, explore the same subconscious territory, as in the 2004 pieces "Sleep" and "When Everything was Forever."

This is an artist whose vision embraces the whole of it, from the micro- to the macrocosmic, an artist whose playfulness and sheer joy of materials — in this case oils and pastels — can successfully pull off the usually tricky most cosmic of images in her oils "Stunning Torrent" and "The Beginning (The End)."

The gallery itself, established in 2002, has more than 3,000 feet of wood floor, sky-lit exhibition space. It focuses primarily on recent work by the emerging and the established, from newer contemporary artists such as Tom Monaghan to the master Oliveira.

It also offers changing exhibitions of 20th century American and European master paintings, drawings and sculpture, emphasizing important historical movements such as the American modernists, the Society of Six, the San Francisco Bay Area figurative movement, and abstract expressionism from both the East and West coasts.

Finally, the gallery maintains a fine ongoing inventory of paintings, drawings and graphics by such masters as Alexander Calder, Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Matisse, Picasso, Park, Robert Rauschenberg and Wayne Thiebaud.

All in all, this is an exhibition in a wonderful setting that promises to capture your imagination and your heart.

David C. Farmer holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's in Asian and Pacific art history from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.