Susan Donahue

Susan Donahue paints in oils both in her studio and plein air. She paints landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and abstracts. She began painting after studying art and cultural history for most of her adult life. Finally, she decided she wanted to do it herself and began painting with some instruction from artists Mark Carder, Julian Merrow-Smith, and Tim Benson. She aims to prompt an emotional response in her viewer and wants them to ask the question: “What am I seeing when I look at this painting?” She will paint during November 2023 at Art Ichol, an art center in Madhya Pradesh, India, where she will paint plein air landscapes, portraits of people she meets and abstract paintings that evoke her response to her experience in rural India. She is moving her art practice from a realistic mode to a more abstract one by using only one large brush that she can manipulate in various ways. She wants to achieve an immediacy and urgency in her paintings as if the image appears in one go and each stroke has its own distinction. The images here show her movement from realism to a more abstract presentation which will be the emphasis in her residency in India. She is a member of the Winthrop Gallery in Winthrop, Washington, and has published an article, “Winthrop Gallery: Art for the World from Artists of the Methow Valley” in Glacial Hills Review, Summer 2022, giving the history of the Winthrop Gallery in the context of the history of art galleries in general.