THE BACKSTORY

At 50, with her children grown and a new chapter opening before her, Donna Morin made a bold choice: she enrolled in Claremont Graduate School's MFA program, moved into a downtown Los Angeles loft on 9th Street, and committed herself fully to the life she'd always imagined as an artist. 9th Street City Girl is her origin story, a self-portrait rendered not in literal likeness but in the essential geometry and gestural marks that have become her visual language.

The composition is elegantly spare yet unmistakably narrative. A circle forms the head. Morin's soul lives in geometry, even when depicting herself. Below, the suggestion of a dress, two legs striding forward with purpose, and the telling detail: one high heel intact, the other broken. This was the early 1990s, when female artists still dressed formally for the studio, navigating both creative ambition and gendered expectations in heels. The broken shoe becomes metaphor: the stumble, the adjustment, the determination to keep moving forward.

She carries an easel, her chosen tool and burden, as she crosses the threshold into her 9th Street loft. Spills and splatters of ink cascade across the surface, echoing the mess and magic of beginning again, of finally claiming space (physical and creative) as her own. The drips recall her admiration for Pat Steir, but here they serve double duty: they're both artistic technique and life itself spilling over, uncontained, exuberant.

This is autobiography as abstraction, personal history distilled into form and gesture. 9th Street City Girl captures the moment when Donna Morin stopped observing art from museum bookshops and tabletop displays and stepped fully into making it, broken heel, heavy easel, and all.