Donna Racovalis
Colour in Your Life featured artist Donna Racovalis appeared on Colour In Your Life Season Twelve (12)
Read a little bit about the artist here and support our site by joining and watching the episode below.
Donna Racovalis is a self-taught Australian artist whose practice includes sculpture, painting and installation.
Utilising all sorts of recyclable interesting materials, Donna’s works are flamboyant and expressive in nature. Donna enjoys researching her subjects, investigates their struggles and their stories. She ponders on the stories and gives them a voice, a voice some may never have heard before. She puts them into a collective collaboration of information and brings them to life on canvas with bright vivacious colours, simple black and white and neutral too.
Some of Donna Racovalis’s paintings contain featured eyes made of resin creating further dimensions, allowing you to see a painting with depth of meaning. Found in the eyes of her subject are its story about its environment, fears and journey, all frozen in time and preserved in resin for eternity. This allows us to see the vulnerability, struggles and passion in the eyes of her subjects. The DMR signature sets her apart and is an opportunity for Donna to express her take on the subject and how she perceives them, again preserved in resin. Donna works in mix mediums sculpture, canvas, resin, metal, recycled and raw materials. Anyone that knows Donna knows that she enjoys up-cycling and giving something used another chance at life.
During Donna’s VCE her desire to work with different materials intensified considerably. Whilst preparing for an art show, her art teacher was trying to convince her that combining plaster, silicon and metal wire were not a viable option for canvas.
So Donna Racovalis did what any stubborn teenager who thinks they know better would do. She made a giant eye with these materials, with large metal eyelashes coming out of the canvas. She entered it into the Schools VCE Art show and came first (a draw with another student). Education Minister Joan Kerner was judging the art show and during the presentation Joan whispered to Donna words of encouragement to follow this. It was then that Donna realized that art could be her career and that science was science and that plaster, silicon and metal really don’t last.
Living in Sorrento, Victoria for ten years and exposure to the sea in this unique region intensified Donna’s love of the water and anything related to it. It became a strong underlying theme in her work. Donna finds creation itself her inspiration.
While living in Sorrento Donna’s family found her hidden collection of work (including Donna’s husband who didn’t know she painted). They all encouraged her to started selling work to Galleries making piles of ready and not ready to sell in 2009.
Donna Racovalis has continued painting, even getting into the corporate world, changing Boardrooms into an inviting place to entertain and do business. Many described Donna’s work as Modern Contemporary or Impressionism. Donna just see’s it as inquisitive fun. Donna often says “If I can make people smile when they see my work, I’m doing my job right.” Join me on my journey and click on my newsletter to be updated with my latest news.
You can contact Donna via her website http://dmrartstudio.com/#!/HOME
Episode: S12E06
Original Air Date: 26th February 2016
