Gwenn Seemel was in two places at once on First Thursday this month: hugging friends, refreshing snacks and cheerfully greeting gallery-goers at two shows of her dynamic, colorful paintings. The topics were government and death.

"Public Faces" consists of portraits of Portland public officials -- police officers, city commissioners and the like -- appropriately hanging at the City Club of Portland. "Private Masks," on display at Everett Station's Starling Gallery, comprises portraits of people whose lives routinely intersect death: a paramedic, a funeral director, a forensic pathologist, the lead author of Oregon 's Death with Dignity Act.

Seemel is a bright, vibrant, 24-year old local artist. She has never been to a funeral. Her portraits are filled with electric swaths of fuchsia, turquoise and lemon yellow; crosshatching patterns that reflect her printmaking background; and palette-knifed motion blurs. Seemel has long shown a designer's eye for color and crisp, lyrical brushstrokes, and now her skills are meeting more mature themes of contradictory and interwoven elements of control and inevitability.

If Seemel's portraits seem a tad effusive at times, it's not because her subjects pay her for the kindness of leaving out the crow's feet. Commissions are still the bread and butter of many a portrait artist's career, and Seemel makes a living off of hers. But for "Public Faces" and "Private Masks," the artist recruited all of her subjects -- not the other way around. She explained her project. She interviewed and photographed each subject. She painted their portraits from the photographs.

Seemel has painted some well-known Portlanders, such as actors and television newscasters. In what may have appeared to some an act of blatant self-promotion, she even turned her paintbrush on local gallerists Elizabeth Leach, Mark Woolley, Charles Froelick, Jane Beebe and others. The resulting body of work, however, showed at the modest Visage Eyewear space, not one of the subjects' higher-end galleries.

Seemel has lived in San Francisco and France, but she got her art degree -- and painted portraits of her professors -- at Willamette University. She calls Portland home, and she seems eager to meet (and paint) all of her neighbors. Her upcoming projects include before-and-after portraits of women undergoing profound physical change, and a tongue-in-cheek collection about patronage that involves starving-artist-seeks-sugar-daddy online ads.

Thus far, Seemel's subjects have been dramatic and eclectic, if a little underdeveloped. Some make the news; some make the laws. Some make or break artists' careers; some make it to the scene in time to save a life. Still others quietly make a petition to die on their own terms. The thread that pulls together all of Seemel's themed portraits is that of judgment.

For "Public Faces," one of Seemel's subjects was Janice Wilson, a Multnomah County Circuit judge who was herself judged by some people when she married her same-sex life partner at the courthouse last year.

A portrait artist is another type of judge, choosing which pose or expression best describes a subject, deciding whether a too-prominent nose steals focus or a set of intelligent eyes shine through. And in the thoughtful and complementary exhibits of "Private Masks" and "Public Faces," Seemel has illustrated judgment's round and slippery form clearly and kindly. Her subjects begin to shine -- and so does her talent.