December 6, 2024 - January 7, 2025
Lavi Daniel (b. 1954) was born and raised in Los Angeles, California and has been painting since he was a small child, influenced by time spent in his grandfather’s sculpting studio.
At age 17, he won a four -year scholarship to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but left after six months, opting to pursue self-study.
He met his future wife, Diane, in 1975. Together, they took what little money they had and traveled to the rain forests of Borneo, where they collected rare antique textiles, a trade that supported them for the next 25 years.
In 1985 Daniel had his first exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum where he showed abstract paintings built with a figurative means, following a theme of “Threat and Shelter.”
The following works shifted, marking what would be a lifelong pattern of investigating a direction deeply, then abruptly diverging into new areas of exploration.
Daniel’s next works were finger applied oil paintings, with a vocabulary devised to carry on a conversation about the relationship between inner and outer phenomena, consciousness, and manifestation.
In 1995, his wife was diagnosed with cancer, which took her life five years later. Daniel reacted to his wife’s death by exploring pastels and creating what curator Anne Ayres called “light-drenched fields of brilliant atmospheric color.”
By 2003, Daniel moved from these amorphous fields in pastel into more abstract architectonic compositions, shifting scale and creating parables of space.
Around 2015, Daniel began to make hard edge abstract colored pencil drawings that he would later make into large scale oil paintings. He followed a new theme he called ”The Dance of Perpetuity:”
“The inspiration for this body of work comes from seeing images of the birds of paradise of Papua New Guinea. They present in spectacular feather costumes, preparing their stages, and performing songs and dance for the purpose of spreading their genes. I construe their performance as a ‘dance of perpetuity.’ That prompt, provides license to move toward extreme opulence, indulging in intense color relationships, intent on expressing the depths of joy and promise.”
He continued in this direction over the next six years, at times shifting the vocabulary’s source as a means of varying the imagery. The colored fragments would receive inspiration from the ocean and rock shapes of the north coast of California, and later from the hoodoo and cloud formations of New Mexico.
2022 saw yet another evolution in Daniel’s work, with small pastels and large scale oil paintings inspired by the rediscovery of a pastel drawing that Daniel made at the age of 7, assuming the perspective of the young boy some sixty years later.
“I’ll with relationships Daniel Long Hawaii; He has Fine Washington; Daniel currently
Daniel continues to refine and develop this trajectory in 2024. begin with some color combinations in mind,” Daniel says of his most recent work, “then dive in a discipline that requires little or no pre-consideration. The first marks are in search of forms and relationships that portend the nature and character of the whole. After that, the painting seems to make itself.”
Daniel has had solo exhibitions at the James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles; Long Beach Art Museum, Long Beach; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; and Hunsaker/ Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica, among others.
participated in group exhibitions at University of Rhode Island, Kingston; Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, Washington; L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA; Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, among others. currently lives and works with his partner, the interior designer Susan Stella, in Tesuque, NM, and Fort Bragg, northern California.
69 x 68 1/2 inches
I never really made a choice about becoming an artist, as the creative impulse and desire to make things was there from the beginning. From a young age I was hard wired to draw and to paint, and my skills were recognized early on. I never looked for approbation from the academy, though, as I found the classroom stifling. Instead, my reference points were my lived experience and engagement with the world at large. Forever curious, I am attuned to people who have the imagination to create environments, integrating an aesthetic awareness with the business of life- often times women. Too, my sense of wanderlust and adventure has always informed my artistic practice, whether it meant traveling the remote corners of Indonesia and Malaysia on a mission to find rare textiles made by Indigenous tribes, or falling in love with Australian plants, studying Florentine and Sienese paintings and frescos of the 15th century, or going crazy over early modern furniture and design. I am a man with great enthusiasms.
As an art maker I have somewhat anachronistic proclivities for long unbroken stretches of stillness, and long looking. With a history of working at home, integrating a love for food preparation, and gardening, mine has been an organic tactile journey of the senses. The arch of my paintings has been divergent. Whether building abstractions with a figurative means, making highly refined and ephemeral finger applied abstract conversations about the relationship between inner and outer phenomena, or revisiting a figurative pastel drawing I made at 7, and re-exploring that state of innocence and wonder some 60 years later. Trusting my tendencies, that feel indelible like fingerprints, to create throughlines of coherency.
Always relying on passion and wonder, to circumnavigate what seems like a great journey through the unknowable.
My so-called oeuvre exists as part of a continuum and the finger paintings I made at six still have resonance for me today many, many decades later. Each drawing and painting may be thought of as a world unto itself, but the whole catalogue of my creative output is just a constellation of points in time, veritable snapshots. Sometimes I am quite deliberate in my approach as I’m enthralled by something I have seen: a painting, a plant, sunset or cloud; and at other times it’s a dance and the form unspools from some inner reservoir of consciousness. I am replenished by the act of looking and by long unbroken stretches of stillness.
My life is integral to my art and I am at home in environments where I can wander the garden, make food and engage sensually with organic forms.
Whether building abstractions in a non-objective sense or using figurative means, there is for me always a relationship between outward appearance and the suggestion of something more, something hovering, humming, reverberating. It is this convergence I am after.
Always relying upon passion and wonder, I am an adventurer, an explorer circumnavigating the corners of the world and my environment traveling up river.
– Lavi Daniel, 2024
