Donna Festa, "Woman Sitting", 2017, Oil on wood.

Donna Festa’s work deals in issues of aging, understanding and learning from elders, and fear of the future. Currently based in Bangor, Maine, Festa creates gestural and tactile work that ranges from oil painting, clay sculptures, and sketches. In each medium, the force from the artist can be felt within the quick and at times violent brushstrokes of the paint and molding of the clay, giving each work tangible textures and unique nuances that mimic the time that has passed on the faces of her portraits. As a figurative artist who primarily depicts single faces on neutral backgrounds using a limited dark and muted color pallet on a small scale, Festa engages in an empathetic act of recording a moment in time with the subject of each of her works, creating in a sense a record of the people who have come before and whose stories are fleeting and often become lost. In a hurried attempt to capture these passing moments, each painting made by Festa is completed in one sitting. In Festa’s BLACK SERIES, the artist uses the motif of elderly faces to explore the fear and uncertainty that the artist experienced after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

 

Donna Festa’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. and has been featured in New American Paintings (Volume 51, 2014), the Art Basil Miami Special Edition of Expose Art Magazine (2014), and Fresh Paint Magazine (October 2013). Festa’s work has also been collected by such institutions as the State Museum of Pennsylvania.