Donna Geyer is primarily a landscape artist born and raised in Perth. Donna has been an artist for four decades studying art as a major, teaching and later exploring other creative areas after finishing studies in film, writing and design.
Over the years Donna has sold her work to collectors, businesses and produced many commissioned pieces for clients as well as having her artworks illustrate a poetry book and contribute to various group exhibitions in Western Australia.
Donna uses acrylics, oils and sometimes resin on canvas.
Being heavily influenced by the vast skylines on the Western Australian coast has led her to focus her artworks on the beauty and simplicity of large skies over water, using multiple layers of paint to capture the light and colour of luminous floating clouds.
Some of her paintings look realistic while others are more impressionistic – basically to her it is all about capturing a feeling and recreating an experience of a moment in time, such as the impact a big sky can have on your emotions as you drive along the coast on the way home from work, or you walk along a beach staring out at the horizon.
In her paintings the sky is always much bigger than the strip of ocean beneath it. The sky filled with clouds, either brooding pre-storm or whimsical and in motion fascinate her as they are forever changing, creating unique dramas of storms approaching or lifting emotions with surreal and otherworldly scenes.
Donna paints entirely from memory, she doesn’t refer to photographs but more to her imagination based on how a sky made her feel. She relentlessly studies clouds, and how the changing weather impacts a sky, especially over bodies of water including in the tropics.
“My practice is to paint with music, to feel rather than over think the process, and to paint quite quickly allowing skill with the materials to marry with both my experience and imagination. To me, the way a sky over water can make you feel is sometimes quite spiritual and that’s what I try to capture in my work.”