One of the most satisfying art experiences involves looking at the work of an artist who has been working a long time but who is not so well known that the art has been distilled into a quick, catch phrase. With few advance clues viewers have to look, ponder and weigh what is in front of them. But if the art shows evidence of growth while the vision has remained steady, that task is undertaken pleasurably.

Such is the case with the painter who calls herself Chinyee whose work now fills the exhibition space a Hudson River Gallery and Conservators in Dobbs Ferry. The show is advertised as "Selected Works 1948- 1999" but the emphasis is heavily on Chinyee"s recent output. Now 70, she was born in China but has lived in New York for the last 50 years. She has been occupied not only by painting but also by working as an interpreter at the United Nations.

A small wall is devoted to work from 50 years ago. Then she was I heavily influenced by the Action Painting side of Abstract Expressionism, and her greatest strength, color, was beginning to emerge. She never forsook the human figure, and in one early watercolor a female nude is emerging from a cascade of color. Among the early paintings is an anomaly, a beleaguered Chinese soldier painted in a harsh realistic style. Chinyee gave this man a big bowl of soup, though, and her subsequent art shows generosity toward the viewer.

Most abstract artists would leave a large amorphous vermilion streak to the viewer to decide whether it is a sunset, but, whimsical but pleasingly, Chinyee adds a small ink drawing of a figure under a beach umbrella. She has also mastered collage, knowing that her straight mastery of watercolor alone might appear too virtuoso. By tearing up and rearranging torn pieces of paper, her vision is reinvigorated.

Lately ocher seems to be her preferred color, and it sets the dominant tone of several large works. But the show stoppers are two related painting, hung close together, which are both named "Hibernation." In each painting a large, lumbering black form, something like a shape out of Robert Motherwell but with cleaner edges, commands the canvas. The shift in position of this burly amorphous yet clearly organic form demonstrated in the two bold paintings is large-scale testimony to Chinyee's continuing mastery of subtle variation.