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Amy Donaldson creates landscape paintings in a personal style that combine visual and visceral elements of her experiences of the world. Engaging with the world around her give Donaldson a deeply personal feeling for humanity and accounts for the range and rich texture of her work. Extensive travel to places as disparate as the earthquake ravaged Haitior art-world cities such as Berlin and New York inform and inspire her. Donaldson’s love of music—from gospel to pop—is reflected in the dynamic, rhythmic pattern of gestural marks that seem to flow in response to whatever tempo and tenor is streaming through her ear buds at any given time in the studio.
Evident in each restless, vibrant composition is Donaldson’s strong sense of color and feeling for space and light, which is achieved by her fusion of crushed, powdered natural pigments with oil paint applied in a freely expressive manner. Using tools other than traditional brushes she attacks the surface of the canvas in a direct approach that is additive and subtractive—a process one may associate with sculpture as much as with painting. She lays down luscious, pliant marks across the surface, then scrapes areas of the composition back, then vigorously adds and scrapes again to achieve her goal. Hers range of expression comprises the appearance of time worn erosion of an aging city to the seemingly endless atmospheric depth cloaking a horizon in a hazy light. Sometimes elements of graffiti appear, their looping letters cut through the roughly layered surface like a trace of humanity from crumbling, antique city walls or an ecstatic cry to the heavens.
Donaldson has attained a signature style that embodies both a sense of immediacy and freshness. One of her favorite subjects is Florida, and the paintings of her home state seem to burst with joy and the bight light of a sparkling Atlantic morning. Then, there are those works cloaked in a more moody and intimate softness and an indefinable depth and an overall atmosphere that recalls European Romanticism and Impressionism.
A native of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, Amy Donaldson has participated in Atlanta's National Juried Exhibitions, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, 6 x 6 Project New York. Her works are in numerous private and public collections. She currently lives and works in Florida.
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