THE BACKSTORY

Donna Morin's soul lives in geometry—in the perfect square, the essential circle, the clean line that organizes chaos into meaning. Walk the Highline embodies this spiritual devotion to form, layering her modernist vocabulary with traces of personal history and hard-won artistic education.

The composition reflects Morin's deep lineage in early 20th-century Modernism—echoes of Kasimir Malevich's radical shapes and Henri Matisse's chromatic boldness—while also drawing from the stylized patterns of mid-century interior design from the 1920s through 1940s. But look closer, and you'll see other influences woven throughout: the cascading drips that pay homage to Pat Steir, whose work Morin discovered not in art history textbooks (which so often excluded women and older artists) but in the books at LACMA's museum shop during her years working in Los Angeles.

Those years at Geary's, the renowned Beverly Hills tabletop and gift store, left their own indelible mark. Day after day, Morin absorbed the patterns of fine china and elegant place settings—geometric arrangements that transformed functional objects into visual poetry. These tabletop compositions quietly infiltrated her artistic consciousness, emerging years later as the rhythmic patterns and structured beauty that anchor Walk the Highline.

The title references New York's High Line park—that brilliant transformation of abandoned elevated railway into sculptural garden, nature reclaiming the rusted carcass of urban infrastructure. It's a fitting metaphor for reinvention, and reinvention is Morin's story. She began her life as an artist at 50, taking up residence in an LA artist loft and drawing inspiration from the post-war modernist and Abstract Expressionist masters who made New York the art capital of the world. Like the High Line itself, Morin transformed what came before—years of observing pattern and form—into something entirely new, proving that it's never too late to build a garden from steel, to find your soul in geometry, to walk your own elevated path.