About the Artist
Donna Grandin is a professional fine artist from St. Lucia. She received an hons. B.A. in Art from McMaster University, in Hamilton, ON, Canada in 1997. Since then she has been exhibiting her acrylic paintings in the Caribbean and Canada, gaining collectors from those areas and beyond.
In 2013 she was part of the Canadian delegation that participated in the 152nd annual Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Carrousel du Louvre, an international group exhibition, in Paris, France.
Donna lives, paints and volunteers in the arts community in Burlington, ON, Canada with her husband and two sons. She also travels to the Caribbean to visit family, galleries and gather inspiration for her art.
She is a founding director of the Arts & Culture Council of Burlington. She is also a member of the Art Gallery of Burlington, Burlington Fine Arts Association, and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington.
About the Art:
Nature, with its organic shapes and patterns, provides the artist with an endless supply of interesting compositions. As an acrylic painter, I capture and translate these compositions through the filters of my personal sense of colour and interest in visual rhythm, to convey mood and movement.
For years I have been painting the landscape imprinted on me as a child, favouring the vibrant colours and vivid contrasts of the sunny Caribbean, with a focus on tropical flowers & foliage (eg, hibiscus, dracaena, croton, frangipani, royal poinciana, banana and coconut trees).
This is a way for me to stay connected to my past, to my family etc, and also to examine the effect that geography has on self-identity.
However, I have been living in Canada for a long time now, and more and more I am moved to paint the local landscape (eg, ponds with water lilies and dragonflies in the summer).
Also, recently I have been working on a series of abstract paintings inspired by peacock feathers, and ferns. Ironically, abstraction allows me to best express the underlying flow, that spiritual connection to Nature … the way Nature feels, rather than the way it looks.
Even when I paint realistically, creating the illusion of depth, my painting process is more that of an abstract artist, pushing and pulling the forms, arriving at the final image through layers of paint and exploration. Ultimately, the subject of my paintings is secondary to the pursuit of the painter’s high – the feeling you get when you follow your intuition and lay down a bold choice of colour that pulls everything together and makes a painting sing!
My art is infused with the passion and excitement I have for my creative process.