Donna K. Bush - Biography

Donna currently lives in Humboldt County in Northern California with her husband of 36 years. This beautiful area, often referred to as the Lost Coast is known for its heavy annual rainfall, but more specifically for its magnificent giant redwoods.
 
The artist doesn't remember a time in her life when she wasn't creating art, singing or playing in the dirt. Her father was a Forest Ranger and her childhood years were spent in the woods of Silver City, New Mexico. This was her constant playground as well as the source and nurturing of her fascination with nature. It was a world full of colors, textures and sounds that she never tired of. Moving to Arizona and eventually California, she was painfully shy while growing up but believes she found her voice through art, music and gardening.

She and her husband Charly raised their three children in southern California, moving north to the small town of Fortuna in 2003 where she found an endless source of inspiration. Over the years she's continued painting and studying art, experimenting with different mediums but settling on watercolor as her favorite. She loves its transparent qualities as it takes on a spirit of its own, blending and transforming on the paper before her eyes. The hardest part is allowing it to perform its magic and not forcing it.

She is most inspired by the simple things that catch her eye as she wanders through her yard with its ponds, rocks, old fences and stumps, as well as the numerous sprawling, haphazard plants. Although her paintings usually tend towards the realistic, being quite bold with saturated color and high contrast, she aspires to be a much looser painter some day.

Donna is now at a point in her life where she has lots of time to paint, reflecting that, "...some of it's good - a lot of it's not" and spends plenty of days wondering why she ever thought she could paint. But the solution to this is in something one of her favorite instructors used to repeat. "Paint a painting...then paint another painting."