On her way to work, Dona regularly makes a point of passing through the Snug Harbor Botanical Garden, taking in the beauty of the many extraordinary blooming flowers and plants to begin her day. A daily visit to a beautiful and peaceful place—one that takes you outside of your regular preoccupations and concerns—can become a sort of meditation to clear one’s mind at the start of the day. I imagine that the colors, shapes, and brilliance of the flowers that she enjoys stay in her mind throughout the day. Photographing those colorful and luscious flowers as a way to keep images of them alive after the flowers fade is, of course, a familiar and common response. But what Dona did with those photographs was more unique and more directed, and was certainly not so simple or common.
What Dona has said she wanted from those photographs was not simply to record what the flower looked like in the moment she saw it, but instead she wanted to build a unique image from a photograph that would express the feelings those flowers ignited in her. For her, that was not the photograph itself. She wanted to create something that was, in a way, beyond the photograph, expressive of the flowers and her reaction to the flowers.
She explored how she might go about doing that, and gravitated to using a fairly unfamiliar and technically exacting printmaking process that begins with a photographic image but has the potential to build on and transform that original photo. Through light sensitive photopolymer intaglio plates she can expose a photographic image onto the plate, but alter that image—layering color, changing the tones—at various steps in the process. The ultimate result is a hand-printed etching. What she has done in this work is to pursue expressing how the flowers made her feel, and not simply duplicating what they looked like. She has given them a life beyond the brief life they had in the garden.
Often the richness of colors in her prints feels otherworldly—almost as if the flowers themselves are emerging from a deep, dark space and exploding into the light with an inner glow and glory. These works feel alive and rich, with a Renaissance chiaroscuro of layered color and delicate tone creating depth. Sometimes the colors jolt us away from the naturalistic and expected palette of flowers but are never garish or out of place. Other times the work layers delicate touches of color, almost like a watercolor paint has gently touched the petals against the open clarity of the daylight around them. They are always tenderly, sweetly, expressing the worlds that these flowers live in, and we delight in the variety of detail, variation of form and color, and feeling.
Nancy Diessner
Instructor Photopolymer printmaking,
Zea Mays Non-Toxic Printmaking Institute, USA
August 2023