Warren Stenberg and Lauren Okano are two artists whose life and work demonstrate how art crosses boundaries.

The two hail from opposite ends of the country — Okano is a native New Yorker, while Stenberg grew up in Honolulu — and have distinctly different artistic styles, which can be seen in the exhibit “Different Strokes,” currently on display on the mezzanine level of the Bishop Place office building in downtown Honolulu.

They regard their friendship as a connection on canvas, a partnership in paint.

“We’re twins, since 1997,” Stenberg said jokingly.

That’s when he and Okano wound up in an art class together at the Art Center at Linekona—now the Honolulu Museum of Art School — studying with the esteemed Harry Tsuchidana. The exhibit aims partly to pay tribute to their mentor, a member of the influential postwar generation of Hawaii artists who studied in New York.

Stenberg, an octogenarian who lives in Kailua, got an art degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa but worked in the commercial printing industry for more than 20 years. He worked a lot with artists during that time, thinking, “Gee, I really love this stuff. When I retire, I want to get into it, not as a commercial artist, but as a fine artist.”

He credits Tsuchidana with helping him develop and refine his inclinations as an artist, expanding his horizons beyond the representational art he had been doing. “Most artists get bored doing representational work. There’s more of a challenge to abstract work,” he said.

Stenberg paints vibrant landscapes of local scenery, such as the Iao Needle; many of his paintings are of scenes of Maui, where his daughter lives. His pastoral “Morning Glow — Paniolo Country” has a calm yet energetic ambience, with a pink pastel sky overlooking an arid pasture. The works reflect his reputation as a colorist, but he sees them as merely as a representation of the land he grew up in.

“People ask me, ‘How come you got so much color in your work?’ and I say, ‘When you’re raised in Hawaii, as soon as you walk out of your house, you’re inundated with colors, hitting you at all angles, so it’s pretty hard not to put that in your work.’”

Stenberg used to work en plein air, getting up at 5-6 a.m. to get the best light, but now takes photos of scenes he’d like to paint, transferring the image to a small flat screen in his studio to work from. “It feels more in-depth, and the screen has more color coming out of it than a print,” he said.

Okano teaches at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hanahau‘oli School and Punahou School. She studied art in New York and calligraphy in Japan, which sometimes appears in her work, before moving to Hawaii about 25 years ago. When she first talked with Tsuchidana about studying with him, he asked for her astrological sign. Told that she was a Leo, “He said, ‘Good! That means we’re compatible,’” she recalls.

“Harry did a wonderful job of engaging everyone in different activities that brought out each individual’s strengths, and he did a lot of exercises in abstraction,” Okano said.

Those exercises are evident in Okano’s exuberantly colorful abstract works, which she also credits to Hawaii. “My color palette changed totally from New York to Hawaii,” she said. “New York is all gray, turpentine color. … (Now) I work only in primary colors. I use red, yellow and blue, but three reds, three yellows, three blues.”

That dichotomy is well represented in her “Now & Zen 3,” which has bright patches of yellow and turquoise along with swaths of gray and black, reflecting her past and present.

Though her paintings radiate spontaneity and a carefree energy, they are painstakingly created. “If you were to ask Harry — Harry watched me paint — he would say to you, ‘The most shocking thing is how long it takes (her) to make a stroke and to think about it.’”

Like Stenberg, Okano also is inspired by scenes around her, but with drastically different results. Her “Blue Note,” for example, consists of amorphous shapes, roughly rectangular, in colors ranging from dark blue to yellow, red and beige. It was inspired by the recent opening night of the Blue Note Hawaii jazz club in Waikiki.

“This is what I took from it, the little touches of listening to the saxophone and having that awesome experience,” she said. “The way I see the world is through color and shapes and just the essence of what it feels to me.”