Donna Hall

I live, work and create from my home and studio on Salt Spring Island, on the West Coast of Canada.

I was born in North Bay Ontario and grew up in Ottawa. I continued my studies at OCA in Toronto after which I pursued a successful career as a freelance transparency retoucher,

My husband and I, making a life style choice in the mid-1990s, decided to head west. In this new iteration of my life I pursue my art practice on Salt Spring Island, a stimulating community of creative friends and talented colleges who are constantly stretching you.

These works are my personal response to an increasingly unfamiliar, fragmented and changing world. My painting process involves building layers of paint and plaster, sanding and scraping the surface to reveal artifacts of earlier layers. Layered into these works are printed and torn waste papers, discarded envelopes, packing material – pulled from my recycle bin. Continuing to build upon the remnants of previous passages, time and space interact, intention and chance merge.

I continue to explore the unexpected juxtaposition between figure and abstraction. The common patterns of human experience, stories, nature and objects through which we attempt to make sense of and understand our everyday lives.