“Unscripted and process-driven is how I describe my practice.” These are the words of Portland-based painter and printmaker Laurie Danial in the catalog for her 2022 exhibition I’m This, I’m That at Froelick Gallery. Two years later, Danial is once again showing work that, while finished, feels like it offers viewers a glimpse into her process. In her current solo exhibition Before my Very Eyes, on view at Froelick through November 30th, Danial’s paintings showcase bright colors, bold shapes, and so much layered texture that parts of them seem to nod to another medium: collage. The works both cohere and dissolve before my very eyes, a flood of energetic abstraction captures the imagination and delights the eye.  

The exhibition starts with a bang, with the largest works in the front of the gallery, their vivid colors visible even from outside the gallery. At 58 x 52 inches, Natural Born Naivety is one of the largest works in the exhibition, but the colors rather than the size are what command attention and make it a showstopper. Executed in a riotous palette of green, blue, yellow, purple, reds, peach, black, and white, the painting boasts shapes that suggest associations–a pair of wings, perhaps a streetlight, maybe a set of lungs–but stop short of actual figuration. It’s like a colorful Rorschach test, one that seems to ask the viewer, “what is it that you see?” 

Natural Born Naivety is an interesting title, one that is brought to bear in the visual aspects of the work. Throughout the background in the top half of the painting, irregular shapes in pale blue paint and filled in with darker blue dots appear at intervals, the spacing suggesting a pattern despite their lack of uniformity. The dots reappear in the center of the canvas, alongside drips of black paint and a smattering of pink paint that almost looks sprayed (or flung) on the canvas. A diamond shape on the bottom of the canvas suggests a streetlight, an effect created in part by the rayonnant white and yellow lines that frame it, like a stylized, almost cartoonish way of showing the diffusion of light. The effect is naive, but in a way that is delightful, that feels free in its fluidity. Danial’s undeniable skill, her sheer deftness with the paint, allows her to engage in this kind of play without ever actually veering into the “lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment” that “naivete” actually describes. The paintings offer something unusual: an equilibrium between experimentation and intention.

Burn Bright, an oil and acrylic painting on panel, features two sweeping diagonal brushstrokes in the foreground, just slightly off center. They make an X shape loosely reminiscent of the kind of stacked, stylized wood representing campfires on park signs. Painterly, almost scribble-like swathes of light blue, red, and yellow overlap and merge, suggesting flames. The strokes are opaque in some places and so loose and translucent in others that the underlying colors come through. The effect is like a flicker or a shimmer, creating so much movement that it doesn’t just draw the eye in, but grabs it and holds on. 

Danial’s paintings are complete and sophisticated compositions, but my favorite thing about them is the playful little moments they offer, in which I see the artist experimenting with and varying her use of the materials. To the right of the flickering brushstrokes in Burn Bright is a white grid, something regimented and orderly that is a static contrast to the movement elsewhere in the painting. But if I look past the grid, I see thin, wavering lines in shades of red and purple beneath. These underlying lines look as though they have been drawn in marker, a kind of intentionally messy, fluid line that is uncontained and therefore unsubdued by the overlay of a white grid.  

Burn Bright is actually one of several paintings in which Danial’s very loose, gestural paint handling gives the works a strong sense of drawing. The effect is that even though the works are entirely painted, it feels as if parts of the surface could be pulled directly from a sketchbook  In Amsterdam, thick, black contour lines articulate a human torso and limbs that seem to merge into the quick, imprecise contour lines making up the leaves and fronds of several plants.  

In Beckon, the composition is united and balanced by loose, sketchy black lines. Danial effectively fools the eye, first in applying paint in a manner that makes it look like drawing, and second in that this impression of drawing or sketching makes the works seem spontaneous when in reality Danial’s process is quite slow. She remarked in a 2021 interview, “It’s not unusual for me to spend six months or even a year on a painting.” The gestural, sketch-like quality of the paintings makes them feel fresh and immediate; it gives them a kind of ease that belies the careful labor that actually went into their creation.

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The second room of the exhibition houses eleven oil-on-paper paintings. Most of these images are 12 x 9, abstractions that, while still boasting bold colors, provide a quieter, more intimate viewing experience. They also demonstrate the range of Danial’s practice. Slideslip features just three connected forms against a white background: a bulbous peach shape set atop an irregular blue-green rectangle, both of which abut a squashy red circle. Slideslip appears spare in contrast to Danial’s paintings on panel and canvas. The work calls to mind the abstract shapes in Philip Guston’s paintings mixed with the palette and gestural brushwork of Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, or Helen Frankenthaler, all artists among Danial’s long list of influences. 

Long Term Strategy, another small-scale oil-on-paper painting, features a red-and-white flower in full bloom floating against a background of peach, blue, and green. At the top of the work, swathes of deep maroon paint and gestural strokes of black create a strong contrast and introduce a kind of tension into the composition. The works in this exhibition are very much formalist investigations of the sometimes mysteriously expressive power of color, line, and shape. It’s clear that form comes first.  As Danial puts it in her artist statement, “Content in my case, emerges from the act of making and not the other way around. I draw upon the history of painting as well as references and visual memories that are both cultural and personal.” 

The smaller works on paper are interesting, and certainly worth a look, but Danial seems to be at her best working at a larger scale. In works like Burn Bright, Natural Born Naivety, and Amsterdam, the compositions take up the whole picture plane, leaving no negative space and seeming to explode off the canvas. They are works with such a strong sense of presence that they seem to announce themselves. The smaller works generally have a more limited palette, larger swatches of a single color, and significant negative space. They require a different kind of viewing, a close, contemplative looking that is also rewarding. Perhaps on one of Portland’s signature rainy, gray fall days I would have felt differently about the smaller works on paper, but on a rare sunny afternoon, the natural light streaming in through Froelick’s front windows, I found myself energized by the boisterous playfulness of Danial’s medium and large format works. 

Before My Very Eyes is a fun show, one that invites viewers to revel in the range and expressive potential of abstraction. There are so many things to discover, which is apt considering that Danial talks about painting as a kind of discovery, a practice that reveals things to her only through rolling up her sleeves and putting paint to canvas. In a moment of so much AI-generated content and the questions it raises about how we understand artistic expression and the very nature of being human, Danial’s introspective, experimental process results in something AI cannot produce, at least not yet–painting that is tactile, weighty, real, but that still, somehow, feels effortless. 

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Laurie Danial: Before My Very Eyes is on view at Froelick Gallery, located at 714 NW Davis Street in downtown Portland, through November 30th. The gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Shannon M. Lieberman

Shannon M. Lieberman is an art historian whose research focuses on art and gender, exhibition histories, and intersections between art and social justice. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara and teaches art history and visual culture at Pacific Northwest College of Art. In addition to her love of visual art, Shannon is an avid reader and passionate audiophile.