Occasionally we come across an artist whose work immediately feels right and TEW is pleased to introduce the painter Amy Donaldson to our gallery clients.
It is not often that we find an artist with really solid technical skills and a mature visual voice. Amy Donaldson fits the bill on both scores and, to cap things off, her work is, simply put, satisfying and beautiful.
Donaldson’s mark making and paint application is energetic and robust with decisive brush strokes. Her paint runs the gamut of thin washes of color to thick slabs of oil and her marks change from lyrical lines drawn with a paintbrush, to stabs of color, applied fast and intuitively.
She is influenced by impressionistic landscape, of that, there is no doubt, but Donaldson also has a deep understanding of abstraction, compositional elements and spatial visualization. Her works are both dense and airy and, as the eye moves across the canvas, there is always a surprise, or an energetic interaction between marks, or color and brush strokes. Her work reminds one of the riparian edges of stream beds or ponds, of wildflowers in thick grass, of reflections of sunlight and sky on the water’s edge.
These are livable paintings…alive paintings…that invoke the sensation of a deep draught of air on a clear day. Other interpretations may be divine flow or divine communication, but, however you see her work, you will also feel the energy behind it.
̶ Jules Bekker, 2019
