Making Fine Art Doesn’t Assure Finally Making It : Careers: Years after being showcased at Newport Harbor, Lavi Daniel has difficulty finding an audience for his work.

Art-school students tend to believe that success breeds success--that once you finally break out of the rut of group shows in obscure venues and get a solo museum exhibition, the world is your oyster. In fact, of course, there are no guarantees.

Of the 20 young men and women showcased in Newport Harbor Art Museum’s sadly defunct “New California Artist” series between 1982 and 1991, only a few--including painters Lari Pittman (1982) and Marc Pally (1988) and conceptual artists Erika Rothenberg (1989) and Buzz Spector (1990)--have had the sort of critical acclaim and curatorial attention that artists dream of.

Pittman, a CalArts alumnus known for large paintings filled with optically challenging decorative devices, was in three Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (including the current one). Along with Pally and Rothenberg, he is represented by leading Los Angeles art dealer Rosamund Felsen.

Rothenberg’s “House of Cards” installation at the South Coast Plaza satellite site of the Laguna Art Museum last year was circulated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Spector, known for his subtle and witty installations of reconfigured books as well as his art writing, continues to show in significant venues.

Other artists in the series have fared less well so far. Some may never have redeemed their early promise and failed to attract well-connected mentors. But others suffer primarily because their approach to art does not reflect a critically favored issue or a trendy “look.”

Back in 1987, when 32-year-old Lavi Daniel had his “New California Artist” show, he was constructing big sets and props to serve as the models for mysterious paintings that mingled images of natural objects (nests, stones, small animals) with glimpses of portions of the human figure.

In her brochure essay, Newport Harbor’s then-associate curator Anne Ayres quoted Daniel’s observation that the elusive imagery in his work was meant to evoke “subliminal emotional possibilities. . . . The paintings are what you see and about what you don’t.”

Just before the show opened, Daniel told a Times reporter that--although he hoped his exhibition would attract interest and attention--”I am ultimately less concerned with making it as an artist than making art.”

Eight years later--having abandoned figuration for an ethereal form of abstraction and then working his way back to a tantalizing combination of the two--he has experienced the reality behind those words.

His drawing exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art last fall came and went without a single review. Although he has shown at various times with well-known Los Angeles-area galleries--Corcoran, Dorothy Goldeen, L.A. Louver--he is not currently represented by anyone.

In fact, after the initial rush of art-world interest sparked by his Newport Harbor debut, he has had a hard time finding an audience for his austere and introspective yet undeniably painterly work.

“Yeah, I have a lament that I haven’t been collected by museums, by collectors,” Daniel said recently, in the course of a long conversation in his spacious studio. “But I understand why, so it doesn’t bother me. . . . A lot of the value [of my work] is execution and craft and painting as a contemplative focus.

“It’s about being quiet a long time and looking long. That’s what’s dying in our culture,” said Daniel, a dark and wiry man with an engagingly antic personality. “I really don’t like to measure it against what goes on [in the art world] except to say that I feel very alien.”

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At 40, he is doing his best work to date: paintings in which vivid and almost palpably volumetric simple forms--suggestive of familiar objects (a boat, a tent, a spinning top) emerge from vaporous backgrounds.

A suggestive void (Daniel calls it a “mouth”) often plays interference between two shapes in these paintings, deepening the air of mystery. Made without a brush--Daniel prefers to use his fingers--on small pieces of board, the works contain subtle reminders of the medieval Belgian and Sienese painters he adores. In one painting, a multicolored cone hints at medieval pageantry.

Daniel says he has loved painting ever since he was a child looking through his grandfather’s large library of art books. In 1973, he dropped out of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to paint and live the hippie life, sustained by a modest allowance from his father. Shortly thereafter he met Diane, who became his wife and partner in a textile-importing business that still supports their family.

After living in Borneo for several years, collecting textiles made by the indigenous Dyak people, the couple returned to Los Angeles.

“I wanted a studio, and I wanted not to have to deal with a dealer,” he says.

It was his good fortune to have a studio in Venice in the ‘80s, where Ayres first saw his work while serving as a docent at the annual Venice Art Walk.

Working with Ayres was “the great part” of the Newport Harbor experience, Daniel said.

“I had met someone who . . . brought me into the dialogue on such a high level for my first exhibition,” Daniel said.

Ayres, who now directs the art gallery at the Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles, said that she had been “struck by the formal beauty of Daniel’s work,” so obviously steeped in awareness of such old and modern masters as Piero della Francesca, Vermeer and Corot. She felt Daniel’s compositional rigor “gave the paintings mystery, profound tenderness and what I can only call a kind of sacred fear.”

Yet despite the euphoric rush associated with the show and its enthusiastic reception among curators and fellow artists, Daniel felt he had come to a dead-end.

“It was a terrible crisis,” he said. “I felt I wasn’t going to be adding to the dialogue. I [needed to] start with a blank and find my way. . . . It was a confidence thing. What is a picture? And who are you?”

For several years he floundered, finding some inspiration in the sophisticated patterning of paintings on bark cloth by the Kuba people of Zaire.

His next body of work, shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1990, was a series of large, amorphous abstract paintings and smaller ink and pastel drawings. After the rich allusiveness of his earlier paintings, these tentative efforts struck observers as a step backward.

“I have not been making work all the time that should be seen,” Daniel concedes. “It’s work that I needed to make, [but] it’s not something that comes to a resolution. . . . Sometimes you have to get away from yourself--work away from your sensibilities--to know who you really are.”

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Something finally clicked in the pastel drawings he made last year. Poised on the edge of figuration, these luminous works contain a sensual vocabulary of orbs and hollows that--as Santa Monica Museum of Art director Thomas Rhoads wrote in the brochure for that exhibition--”invite investigation and discovery” and suggest “a hidden world yet to emerge.”

In these works and the current group of paintings, Daniel said, “I am commandingly after what I don’t know. . . . I’m always grappling with the conundrum of learning how to paint a mystery. I’m realizing that the stronger the suggestion of the real, the [more vivid] the sense of dissolution.”

Ayres said that “the sense of awe is intensified” in Daniel’s recent works.

“They are especially moving because they grasp both inexpressible mystery and real felt experience,” she said.

Yet the problem of finding a receptive audience for Daniel’s work remains. He has considered moving to New York or the far more favorable art climate of London, where a top dealer has shown interest in his paintings, but relocation plans are in abeyance for now. In other respects, life in Southern California with Diane and their 3-year-old son is exceptionally pleasant.

“I’d like people to take a serious look,” he said, “but if that doesn’t happen, what are you going to do? I am a picture-making animal for whom the physicality and the imagistic possibilities [of painting] have inner significance. This process is a way of life, and I’m going to do it irrespective of what anybody does.”