Inside the Studio of Donna Morin

Donna Morin is an artist who, at 86, feels as if she is just getting started. Her abstract paintings, collages, drawings, and prints exude energy and life. A longtime resident of Southern California, Morin takes inspiration from the landscape, the stark light of the Inland Empire, and the highway experiences driving between various teaching commitments. Her work suggests lines and colors of a quiet moment under an umbrella beside the pool or the last rays of a sunset coming through venetian blinds. 

Like many women of her generation, Morin's artistic journey began late. At 50, having entered a new chapter in her personal life and with her children grown, Morin enrolled in Claremont Graduate School's MFA program, moved into a downtown Los Angeles loft, and committed herself fully to life as an artist. Since then, she has been making up for lost time, exhibiting at Riverside Museum of Art, University of California, Riverside, Ontario Museum of Art,  Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, along with a 2-year period where she operated her own gallery, DM Studio, in Laguna Beach. She is now preparing for a show at the Art Depot Gallery in Fontana, CA. I sat down with Donna to discuss the evolution of her work, how she discovered herself as an artist, and what keeps her coming back to the studio each day.

Daniel Penny: I thought maybe we could start with the three sides of your practice. You’re a painter, but you're also a very accomplished printmaker as well as a collagist. I thought it might be useful to just kind of think about sort of how those three practices evolved alongside each other and the journey that you've been on in those respective mediums. I'm curious to hear about what you think of as the highlights of the exhibit, and then maybe we can trace some of the evolution of your practice through a few of those particular works.

Donna Morin: The reason I want to have this Art Depot Gallery exhibition in Fontana is to show my large-scale works, the work that's 86 by 86. When I decided to retire, I came back to my home here in Loma Linda. With the idea that I was going to paint over everything that I had—to paint over all these sad paintings I did earlier. I didn’t want them. And I have them in the garage. They’re stacked up just fine, but they're dark. They're very sad.

Donna Morin in her studio.

Donna: It just seemed like I still had energy. I had a new dog. My dog loved me. I was a happy girl. None of the neighbors were gonna bother me. I didn’t need friends. I didn’t need a social life. I wasn’t looking for anything other than still wanting to paint — the same feeling I had when I was 16, 17.

Daniel:  What was that feeling that you were trying to capture?

Donna: I was happy, excited, full of energy, and I was aware of my surroundings. I love this house. I love the dog, and I said, “We’re going to paint together!” This goes back a long way for me. I spent a lot of time in the hospital as a youngster and I regained wellness through drawing in coloring books. I had this insatiable appetite for color, cutouts, puzzles. That pure joy of creation is what I'm trying to get back to now.

Daniel: I want to talk about being a California artist. You've spent time in the San Francisco area, in Riverside and the Inland Empire. You've lived in LA. And I see so much of this quality of the California light in your work and a lot of the color palette. Tell me about how you react to the environment around you and how those qualities of the landscape or light show up in your work.

Donna: I was born in Michigan but we moved to Northern California for wellness when I was 5 years old. For the last 60 years I have been part of this whole Southern California area. I have perfect weather here where I live. It is 72 degrees here. Of course, during the summer, it's 112, but I have gorgeous sunshine, and I've been on every one of these freeways from here to Beverly Hills. I love this area.

For my show in Fontana, it’s got a lot of works in it that reference the umbrella, like The Protector.  To me it captures the joy of eating outside. That never happened in Michigan when I was growing up.

Daniel: You worked at the bookshop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and I know you’ve spoken about the 20th century modernists, Matisse, and Malevich who were important to you. How did you discover them?

Donna: California was late to the party when it came to abstract art. If you went to LACMA, there was one de Kooning, one Frank Stella, one Rothko, one Motherwell. So I had a few works by these artists to inspire me, but mostly it was through the books in the shop at LACMA that I learned about artists like Jennifer Bartlett and Pat Steir. Their work was huge for me, especially since women were often excluded from art history books—but older artists, too. I have a large painting, Swimming with Matisse’s Fish, inspired by a series of Henri Matisse works with goldfish. For him, they were a symbol of meditation. I tried to imagine what it would be like to swim inside one of his famous fishbowls, surrounded by beautiful patterns.

Daniel: Tell me about some of the living artists who have been influential in your life.

Donna: The first one was Connie Zehr. When I was at Claremont at age 45, that's when I was sad after the divorce. I was crying, crying, crying. And it was during the rainy season. I could hardly see outside. I applied for the MFA at Claremont and didn’t get in, and Connie sent me to see Paul Darrow, who is a painter. He was a head of the Scripps Art department. Of course, I’m still sobbing. This man looks at me like, “This woman, what am I going to do with her?”

But anyway, he’s calm. And he tells me, “Okay, let me hear your story.” I told him that I don’t know who I am. I don't know what I am. I thought I was an artist, but evidently not. And he said, “Well, let’s begin at the beginning.”

Donna: I said, “You’re right, I have to start at square one.”

He said, “Well, that’s perfect. The problem is solved. I want you to go home and paint some squares and come back and see me next week.”

I thought, “Paint squares? What is this?" Well, I drove home and I thought, “Okay, he wants me to paint squares. I’ll paint a red square. I’ll paint a blue square and a yellow square. And so I went back to see him. He said, “Okay. This is great. I want you to paint bigger squares.”

So this was an all back-and-forth deal. He wanted two squares, side by side. He wanted four squares. He wanted me to put more energy into them, and this kept going. And at the end of the time, I had this whole bundle of squares rolled up. He says, "This is great."

And he looked at me, he said, “I want these photographed, and I want you to submit them.” And that's how I got in. I've been painting squares ever since.

Daniel:: What does the square mean to you? 

Donna: It means starting over every time. It means you aren’t there yet.

Daniel: More recently, you’ve developed a printmaking practice. Could you talk a little bit about your evolution as a printmaker and what you feel like you can do in a print that maybe you're not doing on canvas?

Donna: It started with Denise Kraemer. Her workshop. She was very important to me. Denise showed how to print, and she made magic right in front of us. She made stencils. She cut out shapes from file folders. She used material off of orange bags. She used different kinds of netting. She made it not so serious. And I was in a class with a group of like-minded women. We were all trying to learn how to print, and we were sharing together.

It was like, if one person has something that prints in an interesting way, the next person wants to use that. We were physically close to each other using the same tables, so somebody was across from me, and I was across from that person, so whatever I was doing, they loved it, and whatever they were doing, I liked, so we shared.

That didn’t happen in painting. Painting was more singular.

Daniel: Were there particular processes or formal properties that you felt like you could explore in your printmaking? 

Donna: Well, the first thing was definitely texture and pattern. In painting, it was always about the brush. You have the white canvas, you make your marks with the charcoal and, and you sort of go from there. With printing using a brayer, you roll out ink onto the plexi, then you can mark the ink with a scraper, make shapes, lay down string texture etc., then roll the press.  And there’s an element of chance and a surprise. My teacher, Denise, calls chance a gift from the universe. If you’ve got too much ink on the plexi, it’s gonna squish and make a run. Too little ink, you barely get an image. So you’re at the mercy of the universe, and I think that was what took me really years to understand.

Daniel: You’re in the mature phase of your career, you've been painting for decades. What do you feel like you're drawn to now that maybe you avoided earlier, or that you're returning to now after many years and seeing in a new light?

Donna: I am painting, but I am a little more excited about what I'm doing on paper. My soul is in geometry. That I know. I can do well with squares, circles, and straight lines, and the Japanese ink will work into organic shapes.

Recently, the black Japanese ink work has been a transition into gouache and colored ink art. These images are on watercolor pages. Simple squares of color are layered with irregular feather brush strokes. At my elderly stage, skills have changed. Currently, hand and arm tremors challenge my skills.

So I'm making this book of colors with this feather pattern marking on it. It's an all-over pattern. And now, the squares have become kind of loose, not so confined. I have to use my imagination to see what it is. Sometimes it is a figure. Sometimes it's a flower. Sometimes it's neither. What's important is that you cannot control it.

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As our conversation ends, this final thought seems to encapsulate not just her artistic process, but her approach to life itself—embracing the uncontrollable with wonder and acceptance.