A passion for painting and drawing has been with me since early childhood but lay dormant as life took me on a path of motherhood and working as a Teachers’ Aide. However, health challenges in my forties led me to rediscover these passions once again.
An interplay between chance and something more considered occurs within my paintings and I never fully know where the work will take me. I seek the solitude of my home studio to dive deep into a zone of subconscious thought that results in expressive and emotive abstract pieces.
Surrealism, Impressionism and Expressionism are all movements that have influenced my work at one time or another throughout my career. I am continually experimenting and evolving in my pursuit to make interesting and engaging work. The exploration of art and artists fuels me and feeds into my creativity. I’m motivated by things that are going on around me, such as, environmental or social issues which reveal themselves through the work under the guise of abstract forms and expressive colourful marks. More recently I have been exploring how environmental and social concerns have had an adverse impact on the human psyche and included psychological portraits into my abstract paintings.
I like to play with the relationship between colour and emotion and translate that into the work, my intention is to exude an energy or strength within the work that captures the link between process and inspiration.
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BIO
Donna relies on instinct as she lays down expressive marks in a multitude of layers that either work as the resolved piece or as a backdrop for something more figurative.
Nothing has been predetermined in her abstract expressionist pieces as her subconscious takes over and her intuition kicks in.
Donna completed a Bachelor of Fine Art, at the University of Newcastle in 2008. She has had several solo exhibitions and has been involved in numerous group exhibitions both, nationally and internationally, having exhibited in London for the first time in 2018.
Donna has been a two- time finalist in the Gosford Art Prize with her work shortlisted by judge, Brian Stratton in 2019, she won first prize for the Non – Indigenous category in the Reconciliation Art Awards in 2010, held at the Gosford Regional Gallery and has been a two-time finalist in the Lethbridge Art Prize in Queensland, as well as gaining numerous other accolades and recognition over the years for her work.
Donna has been involved in some important community projects, such as Art for Epilepsy, Art Out of the Box - Take 3, and fundraising at her very first solo exhibition in 2009 for Coast Shelter, Central Coast. Donna was also a community representative of the Gosford Regional Gallery, 2013-2016 and has had artist profile features in several issues of Art/Edit Magazine, been featured in the Central Coast Express Advocate and will be featured in Artists of the Central Coast - In There Own Words, a book by fellow artist Glenn Hambleton.
Her work is hanging in private collections within Australia, and the United Kingdom
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