Donna McKay
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Yahara Bay Distillers, Fitchburg 6250 Nesbitt Road, #200, Fitchburg, Wisconsin 53719
press release: The Gallery at Yahara Bay Distillery is excited to announce our Artist for the month of August, Donna McKay. A gallery opening reception will be held for Donna on August 3rd from 5:00pm-9:00pm at Yahara Bay Distillers and Event Center in Fitchburg. Guests will enjoy an artist meet and greet, light snacks, and samples at the tasting bar. Tours can be scheduled online or by calling the Distillery. The gallery opening reception is free to the public and will also feature a cash bar offering locally made craft cocktails. Donna’s work will be on display at Yahara Bay Distillers Art Gallery throughout the month of August 2017.
About the Artist: Donna grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where She attended UW-Eau Claire as a fine art major. She enjoyed working with ceramics and weaving as well as drawing and painting. While at the UW she gained an appreciation for art history. She loved learning about other artists - their styles, their techniques, their lives. In 1980 She moved to the Madison area where she met her husband of 31 years, Scott. He has been very encouraging and supportive of her work. They had both worked in retail sales for a number of years when she decided to work toward an associate’s degree in graphic design. She wanted to make a living being creative and graduated with that degree in 1994. She has been working as a graphic designer and illustrator ever since. When time allows - of course never enough time - She’ll go back to her fine art roots and paint.
Artist Statement: When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else... Nobody really sees a flower – really – it is so small – we haven’t time – and to see takes time... So I said to myself – I’ll paint what I see – what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.” -Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe’s work is definitely a source of inspiration for me, especially for this series of larger than life blooms. Flowers are a little world unto themselves, mysterious, sensual, filled with light and color, miraculous. If we only take the time to experience them, we are forever changed by the beauty of their fleeting existence. I try to capture the transparent quality of light and how it affects color. I like working in acrylics because of the range of transparency and opaqueness I can achieve, building up layers of transparent color or lush, opaque depth. I enjoy the immediacy of acrylics and use a combination of working from life and my own photographs in my work. When flowers are my subject, I aim to capture their mystery and their essence at that moment in time. More elusive are the feelings and emotion my subjects convey and I hope to capture them for the viewer as well.
The Gallery at Yahara Bay offers a pressure free venue for artists to share their work with the local community. The gallery work changes monthly and is open to the public weekly Tuesday through Friday from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm, Thursdays 11:00am until 10 pm, and Saturdays 11-5 pm.