THE BACKSTORY

California Sun is a love letter to the Inland Empire, where Donna Morin has spent decades raising children, teaching art, and absorbing the landscape outside her kitchen window. This painting didn't arrive through careful planning but through lived experience, a visual diary of the place that shaped her life.

The composition maps her personal geography: mountains rise to the north, the coastal south sends cool evening breezes, fish swim in deep blue waters, and wild cat tracks mark the forests she knows intimately. These symbols combine memory with the literal sights that greet her most days.

This is the accumulated knowledge of a life fully inhabited. Morin drove her children to school and the beach, navigated Southern California's sprawling freeway system as an adjunct professor, ran a gallery space in Laguna, worked in Los Angeles. Each commute, each errand, each teaching obligation became an opportunity to internalize the rhythms and patterns of this place until they could emerge, unplanned, onto canvas.

California Sun isn't about a single perfect afternoon or poolside moment. It's about the full sweep of building a life here: the mountains, the coast, the wild, the domestic. For Morin, this is home in its entirety—her grown family, her dog, her studio practice, and the landscape that holds it all together.