Obsessive Geometric Backgrounds: Art by Donna Howard
Bowled Over, acrylic on canvas
Donna Howard paints in acrylic, creating bright and colorful images of whimsical cartoon animals that often hide a slightly darker, deeper, and more emotional core. The sense of tension in Donna’s works is reinforced by her intricate, almost obsessive geometric backgrounds.
Martinis for Two, acrylic on canvas
I like the contrast between Donna’s geometric abstract backgrounds and her highly simplified characters. While at first glance these paintings appear fairly straightforward, with saturated colors and naïve-style forms. However, the artist’s compositional choices and the details she chooses to pay attention to are demanding of longer observation. Donna herself has noted that that the characters in her works often directly reference people she knows in real life, a fact which turns each work into a direct and interesting allegory waiting to be unpacked.
The front page of Donna's website
Stylistically, Donna’s characters remind me of the works of David Faulk, particularly in recent works where these figures stand out defiantly from the backgrounds. In older works, Donna’s figures tend to almost disappear into the backgrounds, appearing to be consumed by them.
