THE BACKSTORY

In Field Grasses II, Donna Morin captures California's precarious beauty—the golden grasses that define the state's landscape and, in drought seasons all too familiar to longtime residents, become tinder for devastating wildfires. Created on exquisite Japanese paper in reverence to the ink masters she admires, this work marks a pivotal moment in Morin's evolution toward improvisational action.

The technique itself embodies experimentation: beach netting pressed into ink creates vibrant bursts of energy across the surface, the mesh pattern suggesting both the delicate structure of dried grasses and the explosive danger they harbor. It's a visual paradox—vulnerability and volatility contained in the same form, beauty shadowed by threat.

But there's another layer of surrender at work here. At her current stage of life, Morin has learned to work with hand and arm tremors that challenge the precise control she once commanded. Rather than fight this shift, she has moved toward expressive and improvisational gestures where the point is exactly that—you cannot control it. What matters is embracing the uncontrollable with wonder and acceptance, letting the body's natural rhythms become part of the creative vocabulary. The tremor becomes gesture, limitation becomes liberation.

Morin has always woven elements of the natural world into her practice, but Field Grasses II reflects a deepening devotion born from witnessing Mother Nature's suffering and her own body's changes. The work functions as both homage and elegy, celebrating the resilient grasses that blanket California hillsides while acknowledging fragility—of landscape, of control, of certainty itself.

The choice of Japanese paper connects her to centuries of ink masters who understood the relationship between medium and meaning, between restraint and expression. Field Grasses II holds this wisdom: what we cannot control often reveals what we most need to say.