Bio

Laurie Danial is a painter and printmaker based in Portland Oregon. Grounded in experimentation, she describes her work as process – driven and unscripted, exploring the connections between gestural abstraction, geometric pattern, and figuration. Danial attended Pacific Northwest college of art and Portland State University in Portland Oregon and has been represented by Froelick Gallery in Portland since 2006. She has been featured in numerous solo and group shows nationally since 1991, including exhibitions at G. Gibson Gallery (Seattle), Portland Art Museum, Oregon Center for Contemporary Art (Portland), Schneider Museum (Ashland, Oregon), University of Oregon (Eugene) and more. Her work is held in the permanent collections of PacificSource, (Springfield, Oregon), Oregon Health & Science University (Portland), and the Regional Arts and Culture Council/City of Portland. She is the recipient of a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and was awarded an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship.

Artist Statement

UNSCRIPTED AND PROCESS-DRIVEN is how I describe my practice. Embracing uncertainty and tapping into stream of consciousness has been my preferred means of uncovering a narrative that was previously unknown to me. 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. There are so many big and small aspects to making a painting—instinctual, analytical, conscious, and unconscious–not to mention good old muscle memory. Loosely paraphrasing something Per Kirkeby and many others have spoken about, fundamentally, a painting is layer upon layer, and by trial and error, structure and content slowly emerge. Until I begin to engage with the materials and this process, I can’t realize an outcome.