Otomys is delighted to announce representation of Dee Donaldson. Dee Donaldson will be exhibiting at Otomys this August, alongside Joel Sorensen.
Otomys: This body of work has been developing in your mind for over a year and took just as long to create. What was the moment it shifted from an idea you were carrying to something you had to start making?
Dee Donaldson: I had been making my way into this body of work with smaller pieces for some time, feeling my way. I wanted a particular type of gallery show for these works and felt that they needled to be bigger. When I was granted that show at Otomys I felt I could let them increase in scale and give the body of work momentum.
Otomys: You often explore layering and shifting visual planes. How do you decide when a painting has reached its "final" state, especially when the visual language itself keeps evolving?
Dee Donaldson: Painting often feels like a a puzzle or a chess game to me. When I start there are lots of moves available; the game is quite open. Decisions or ‘moves’ direct the work in a particular way. After a decision there is a period of assessment - that move prompts another move. It’s a kind of “my turn your turn” with the painting. It’s quite hard to explain but the painting is finished when there are no more useful moves. The painting goes quiet and stops demanding. If I lose connection with the piece for some reason this can feel never ending as it never quite reaches this place.
Otomys: There's a strong physicality to your relationship with paint. How does that tactile engagement shape the emotional register of a piece?
Dee Donaldson: Yes, I think painting is a very energetic and physical thing a lot of the time. The actual application of the paint often feels much more instinctive than the other decisions I’m making. I think the ‘how’ of making a painting is inseparable from the ‘what’. When I haven’t been painting for a while and I’m missing it, it’s this that I miss - the energy and the application. I need a lot of space when I work as I move around a lot.
Otomys: The exhibition text describes your forms shifting between something "elemental and inchoate”, like clustered rocks and recognisable human bodies. Is that ambiguity something you're consciously holding open, or does it resolve itself as you paint?
Dee Donaldson: I am trained in a type of classical realism. This realism has been dissolving in varying degrees for some time. It’s not a conscious choice it just doesn’t allow me the creative freedom that’s been pulling at me. I still love many aspects of realistic painting, the way light falls on skin, the foreshortening of a knee, the gesture of a hand… So I suppose what’s coming through is a grappling with how these forms can dissolve and fragment and still maintain the essence of their origin? I’m still not sure how they will ultimately resolve.
Otomys: Virginia MacKenny's essay links your work to a lineage of crucifixions, depositions and the fall of the damned. What draws you to that Christian iconography as a way of processing something happening right now?
Dee Donaldson: Caravaggio revolutionised traditional iconography by replacing idealised figures with depictions of ordinary working class people. He’d use a theatrical light feel and staged composition to convey and emphasise the emotional pitch of the work, which was generally commissioned by high ranking nobles and wealthy collectors of Catholic leaning. He was often charged with irreverence and rejected because his subjects didn’t fit the saintly standards required.
My interest in Boroque painting is quite layered too. I’m interested in painters like Caravaggio because of the irreverence in a way.. Saints are peasants with dirty feet. The Virgin Mary is a dead prostitute. The truth, the lies, the real the fake.. I’m not attached to Christian iconography per se, I’m much more interested in disassembling these narratives and seeing what happens.. holding the intensity but reflecting on our current world.
