I love it when things are where they are not supposed to be…
Color stirs my feelings and moods much as music does.
Forming a structure, flowing the paint, playing with color against the aerating white of the paper all define my artistic spirit. Transparent and opaque watercolor along with oil pastels, japanese ink, charcoal and graphite are media I use. Deep pigments stir – either straight from the tube or mixing until the color pleases my eye.
Applying paint with pregnant juicy brushes, a palette knife or a finger nail digging in the surface, are very satisfying. Calligraphic marks, denoting shapes and allowing the brush to take me there are favored techniques.
My studio is only a storage space – a tool room where I go to think about colors, brushes, papers and surfaces. Words that inspire: sleeping beauty turquoise, end umbrella and languid movement.
I love new surfaces to paint on – bar towels, handmade Japanese papers, rough and hot, soft – but least of all cold press. Asian papers with their filmy textures excite the spirit of my work. Recently I am printing images of gloppy paint onto fish – the ancient Japanese art of gyotaku.
BIO
Donna Constantinople was born in Boston, Massachusetts and has studios in Washington, DC and Blue Hill, Maine. She studied at Northwestern University where she received her Bachelor of Arts and at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia and Yellow Barn Studio in Glen Echo, Maryland. Her collaborations with artists in Maine include Deer Isle, Blue Hill and Mt. Desert. Her paintings embrace sumi e and other Asian Art techniques and were included in two recent exhibitions: Water and Light, Blue Hill, Maine and Flowing Watercolors, Bethesda, Maryland.
She was a founding partner and president of KMA Communications based in Washington, DC and her work there included arts communications, graphic design and marketing. Her projects for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Washington Project for the Arts, National Geographic Society and Discovery Communications, individual artists and photographers all frame her continuing passion for the art world.