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Donna Schaffer's Artist Biography |
Art has been a main thread throughout my life. It wove through 23 years of advertising agency and photojournalism experience and resulted in the development of my personal dimension of oil painting - especially in the painting of incredible environments - the vineyards of Sonoma County; and the undersea world of scuba diving. This connecting thread of art has made me very aware of the color and light in the worlds around me. 
Although I've only lived amongst the winecountry vineyards since 1990, I've been a fan of the Healdsburg area since my husband and I moved to Silicon Valley in 1977. How could I not be a painter? This is truly an amazing area with the vineyards, the forests, the lakes and not far from the ocean. Each sunrise and sunset takes your breath away. On horseback I've had the opportunity to discover many, many Sonoma County vistas. Click here and you'll see images of many of my landscapes paintings. 
I also enjoy capturing the essence of family, friends and commissions. At times my resulting paintings are painterly, at other times I strive for realism. And while I love to do figure drawing and painting with a live model, most people (and all animals) require that I work from photographs. One of the more interesting commissions I've done required incorporating many photos into the same scene. Click here to see some of the original photos sent to me and the final oil painting on linen. I prefer to work from my own photos because with my digital camera I can snap, snap, snap and have lots of reference images to work from. But on the occassion that I have just a single photo or two to work from, my experience with Photoshop comes in handy. In fact, I'm so enamored with Photoshop that I spend too much time on photo restoration and repair. Bringing those faded, damaged photos and slides back to life, rearranging photos, and enhancing photos is all so satisfying to my composition and design! Click here to see a few of my photo restorations.  My other hat is scuba diving. I've been a diver since 1976; and started underwater photography in 1983. In addition to lots of diving from Mendocino to the Monterey, I've been all over the Caribbean and South Pacific to pursue scuba diving adventures. Each trip now has its own carousel (or two) of slides of the underwater marine life and scenes. A lifetime of underwater painting reference material! But underwater photography is particularly tricky. Looking at the resulting slides with an artist's eye has always been a disappointment. Underwater flash photography can cause harsh shadows in images. Natural light is too dim to show much color on the exposed film besides blue (especially in these Northern California waters). The deeper a diver goes, the more the color is lost. The reds and yellows are the first colors lost. My experience is that human eyes are much more sensitive to undersea color nuances than any film. A few years ago I began the creation of a body of work on my Northern California undersea experience. I am endeavoring to recreate the images, colors, and shadows of the undersea world as I've seen it. However, these paintings are not "copies" of my undersea photographs. I use a painterly approach and make many adjustments and modifications such as the lighting intensity to counteract the effect of strobe lighting, or I remove the artificial light completely and give the painting an underwater feel where shadows are barely evident and contrast is low. And while I don't paint a "photorealism" style, the marine environments I create are based on reality, I won't create a school of "pretty fish" in a species that never schools. I won't mix marine life from various oceans of the world into a setting that wouldn't occur. For non-scuba divers in particular, many of the paintings work well as abstracts too. 
The silver thread is that these paintings resonate with people. More paintings are planned for this Northern California series, and with each dive I go on, I have more subjects I wish to paint! Visit the site at www.underwaterpaintings.com. Click here and check out the photos from our March, 2002 trip to snorkel with the humpback whales! Visit my underwater paintings site to see paintings I've created from this experience! 
I spend most of each week plein air and/or studio painting. My work is represented by: Click here if you'd like to see my personal "Schaffer Family" website
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Underwater Paintings Wine Country Landscapes Portrait Paintings Still Life Paintings E-mail Me Schaffer family website All Rights Reserved © 2003-2007 Donna S. Schaffer |
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