Donna Stubbs – Making History
Interview by Vidabeth Bensen and Forrest Greenslade May 2023
Mixed-media artist Donna Stubbs Art Studio creates amazing abstract compositions from a plethora of diverse materials she has accumulated through her everyday life. “I love to search for discarded items in thrift stores that speak to me in some way. I take photos everywhere I go and use these images in my work. Searching for such ephemera, deconstructing it, and thinking about it is where my process begins.”
Donna makes marks with drawing tools, sands, scrapes, and rubs into the substrate to reveal images transferred to the surface. She paints over most of the collage with the intention of revealing parts of it later in the process.
“I prefer wood panels because I like the texture, how rigid it is, how it sits off the wall and the beautiful, exposed wood sides. I explore and experiment with saturated color, hurried linework and abstraction. Ultimately, my art practice is about combining college, photography, and drawing with multiple layers of color to intuitively create work that has a sense of the places I am drawn to.”
Donna’s work recaptures a lifetime of creativity. “I grew up in the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina and always find that abandoned or forgotten areas are where my interest lies. I have been drawing, taking photographs and painting since I was a child. My Mother encouraged me to make art and read over everything else.” Donna studied fine arts at Guilford College. She worked as an arts fundraiser at the Durham Arts Council and at the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC. She took a degree in Interior Design at the Corcoran College of Art + Design and worked for 12 years in that field.
Donna returned to NC in 2013, settled with her family in Chatham County, and devoted herself full-time to her art practice. Currently, Donna is a member artist at Five Points Gallery in Durham and Frank Gallery in Carrboro, and participates in various local and regional exhibitions. She teaches mixed media classes at the Arts Center in Carrboro. Her work can be seen on her website: https://www.donnastubbs.com/ and on her presence on the Chatham artists Guild website: https://chathamartistsguild.org/artists/donna-stubbs/.
“I hope people will find new things to look at and think about every time they see my work. I hope they sense movement, emotion and a bit of the past lives of the things I have added to each of my pieces. I tell people that they are not narratives I have created – they are histories.”
Donna Stubbs makes her Chatham Studio Tour debut the first two weekends of December 2023.
