Donna Moylan was born in Boston, where she lived for the first 19 years of her life. A scholarship to The Museum School meant remaining in the city for college; however when the school organized a trip to Rome she took it and never got onto the flight home. Moylan ended up living in Rome for 23 years.

In the 70’s she started a preschool for children in the center of Rome called The Children’s Workshop that she ran for ten years. The focus of the school was art, both for the children and for Moylan, who observed how, as children develop, they draw and paint and later explore other mediums like building and sculpture as well as music and dance.

Her first shows in Rome were at the Mario Diacono Gallery and at the Gian Enzo Sperone gallery. In the early 90’s having moved to New York City she found a live/work studio in Brooklyn and has exhibited widely in the States. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America and other journals and is in The Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library Collection and in numerous private collections in The United States and in Italy.

Currently she lives and works in Brooklyn and in Kinderhook, NY.

QUESTION:

The way you work with place in your paintings is quite distinct, as if you have a precise sense of what the idea means to you, as if it is important that your sense of suffuses anyone looking at your work. How would you talk about place and location in your work? Is there placelessness in your paintings at times or as well?

ANSWER:

Yes, I begin paintings with the background setting; sometimes that’s where the action is, sometimes it’s all there is to the painting.

I put us somewhere meaningful, usually a recognizable place such as a field, a house or landscape, and try to confer a sense of purposefulness in the choice of setting, basically convinced that such and such a place will create associations that ground the whole image.

Bright Trees 2018 18×24″ oil on panel

At this point in my waking life and in my work, the degree of consciousness or planning that is required is unclear — things are blending. Sometimes I think there are three dreams we live in: the dream of waking life, the dream of sleep, and a kind of third dream where imagination, memory…our psychological state, our bodies’ experiences…and so on, can create a sense of deep understanding where images arise to our minds, where we feel inventive.

Asleep, the settings of my dreams are elaborate and distinct, usually ancient country villages or piazzas set among lavish buildings, or — a classic for many of us — rooms I discover in my house that I never knew were there.

By Boat, 2018, 24×30″ acrylic on pane

In my waking life the fact that I’ve had to move many times from house to house, city to city seems to have sharpened my domestic instincts. It seems I’m constantly building and decorating new spaces, as if striving to make a permanent home to settle. I sympathize with any migrant or refugee, I envision people from millennia ago searching for the better place, roaming, stopping, setting down roots.

My paintings these past few years point out the fragility of our common home. It seems we are on the cusp of big decisions, how to manage our ecology, how to live gently on earth. Although this preoccupation dates back to work I did in past decades, now it’s coming up in my work specifically.

Drought/Flood 2020 oil on canvas 48×54″