Trish Dunbar-Donald

A resident of BC for the last 40 years, I learned to paint in oils in the1980’s. I moved on to acrylics and watercolours in the 1990’s when I created watercolour house-portraits as well as some commissions for cards and paintings. 18 months at The Victoria College of Art in 2004 taught me an invaluable lesson: that my art has merit and value. Since then, I have been on a slow journey of discovery, painting whenever I could. Upon retirement in mid-2022, that journey has picked up speed now that I have the freedom of painting whenever I want.

I can now see the progress in my work and have been working on series of paintings, experimenting with media and subject matter. This year, I started submitting some paintings to on-line shows and galleries. Three paintings were accepted as Finalists in Gallery Ring’s online July 2022 Colour show. I currently have 2 paintings hanging in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s Small Works Show and 3 paintings are hanging at the Eccentric Artist Gallery in Esquimalt, along with a 4-part mixed media polyptych.

As long as I continue to paint and grow, I can only get better at my craft.

Some of my paintings this year have been my way of exploring how I feel about landscapes. I love a beautiful landscape and trees and the feeling these can give to me. But at the same time, I want to find my own voice, my own colours, and my personal way of conveying those feelings.

I started my Morning Walk series in the fall of 2022 with September Morning Walk. Unfortunately, we had an extreme drought in the summer and early fall of 2022 and everything was brown and dusty and the leaves of some of the trees were already starting to turn colour as they died. I challenged myself with a way of making that beautiful either by changing and playing with colour, as in September Morning Walk, or by making the most of the colours available to me, as in A Glorious Morning. I didn’t want them to convey a feeling of death and hardship but of beauty and a looking-forward to more plentiful days.

I am anticipating an interesting development in this series as the year turns toward Spring.