TURNING BRIEFLY to home, we find a real gift of pleasure at the Frumkin-Struve Gallery, 620 N. Michigan. Nina Beall, a young painter from Texas now living in Chicago – she graduated last year from the School of the Art Institute – is having a first solo exhibit.

Beall piles masses of acrylic on canvas, often by extruding the pigment from a cake decorator. The wormy loops and bolts of strong color make tree trunks bulge up to three inches out from a flossy landscape, and cause rainbow surf to rise as foaming flowers above a cotton candy ocean. Bucolic landscapes and marine fantasies – cows seem to graze in an azure ocean – are joined by a few decorative images of tropical birds in schemed flocks.

You can find bits of Van Gogh in Beall’s method, and her bursting vitality. Yet there is none of the Dutchman’s urgency, his hunger to embrace nature and be ministered by her. Beall is a blessedly youthful, healthy artist. Her work is a romp of excess, high on paint for its own sake and humorously loyal to a child’s sense of bounty: Her glutted innocence is remarkable now, and she’ll probably get even better. (Through March 13)