Leaning into Joyfulness: Donna Howard Wows Residents with Special Exhibition
Summary
A prolific painter, Donna Howard brings many creative gifts to her role as Programs Assistant at Youville Place, where her motto as an artist - "I paint because it brings me joy" - has informed her approach to resident care.
“When I don’t have specific ideas, I do ‘self-portraits’ – I ask, ‘what do I want to be?’ I can be a cat. I can be a chicken.”
Last month, Youville Place residents were thrilled to get a glimpse of Donna Howard’s acrylic paintings. The exhibition featured highlights from the past eight years of Donna’s painting career and brought together a body of work that incorporates nature, cartoons, nursery rhyme, and the artist’s unique sense of color and composition.
“My paintings are meant to be whimsical and kind of quirky,” read her artist statement at the exhibit. “There was a point in my life when I needed to twist up my world into something colorful, comfortable, and safe.”
Long before she joined Youville’s Programs Department, Donna studied art at UMass Amherst. But it would take her nearly forty years to gain confidence as a painter and find her visual language. “I remember when I was in school, one of my professors told me that my paintings had ‘no depth,’” she remembers. “That really set me back and it was a long time before I picked up my paint brushes again.” Instead, she took advantage of the school’s abundant studio resources, which included a foundry and welding equipment for large scale sculpture, as well as many other forms of media. “It was a great opportunity to experiment with equipment I wouldn’t have access to anywhere else,” she remembers.
Luckily for us, Donna’s painting renaissance began about ten years ago, when she turned her attention to nature for inspiration. She began painting stylized scenes inspired by the outdoors, exemplified by works such as “As Soon As I Found My Voice,” and “Sun Garden.” She also gravitated toward simple, cartoon-like animals and human characters. One of the mainstays in her compositions is a background of colorful “tiles,” which can vary in density and complexity from one painting to the next. Especially when juxtaposed with her flowers and plants, the tiles often take on an organic quality, suggesting proliferating cells and themes of regeneration.
“My best guess is the tiles an effort to have a tiny bit of control in my world while the real world can be quite chaotic,” she has stated.
The complicated backgrounds – in contrast to the simpler, often monochromatic creatures that occupy her foregrounds – can make or break the composition. “I’ll spend more time on these than any other aspect of the painting,” says Donna. “It’s so important to find a balance of colors. Often it will take days before I’m able to finish this process.”
“I find that my home studio in the basement calls to me,” she says, explaining that to her, painting is an ongoing compulsion – especially when there is an unfinished work in progress. “I think that I paint the way other people turn on the television,” she says. “I paint because it brings me joy.”
Donna brings the same philosophy to her daily work with residents at Youville Place. Whether she is leading an art class, having one-on-one conversations or assisting at an afternoon concert, joyfulness permeates her interactions. It is no wonder that the same joyfulness came through as residents reacted to Donna’s paintings.
Donna currently maintains gallery space at Gallery Z in Lowell, a space she shares with twelve other artists.
“Still Live with Squares”
“After The Ladybug Picnic”
Sun Garden
