Donna Barnes-Roberts is a painter of live stuff, for the most part. She has had a checkered career and varied past (another way of saying that she didn't know what she wanted to be when she grew up), but has now settled on a career of painting. This is subject to change at a moment's notice.
 "Rhododendron" 
"Hollyhock" Original Watercolor
"Pink Azaleas" Original Watercolor
"Iris Splash" Original Watercolor
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She began drawing like so many children, with crayons and paper, but early on, showed a knack for observation. When her cousin insisted that the sky should be drawn as a thin blue line at the top of a piece of paper, Donna insisted that when she looked at the sky, it was visible everywhere. This may have been an early indication of the sense of verisimilitude that Donna strives for in all of her work. Her mom helped her hone her observation skills by occasionally drawing Donna's attention to an interesting detail of a scene or subject. Her powers of observation were sorely tested a few years later when her dog was excited to a frenzy by the appearance of strange, flashing lights in the sky, and a strangely odd voice, saying "here doggy, doggy" Naturally helpful, Donna looked up in the sky, and realized that the dog, who was deaf would not be coming to visit the flying saucer that materialized in her back yard. When Donna walked up to them to explain why the dog did not respond, they thought she must be a very unusual dog (So much for superior alien intelligence). Once the aliens realized that they had made a mistake and after updating their translation software, they felt they needed to wipe her memory clean of the encounter before leaving her and her dog behind. The odd thing is that they must have left behind some mental change in her brain, because afterwards she felt that everything around her was just about to break out and converse with her - even rocks and trees. Her sense of shape and color became heightened, and she doodled and drew her way through school with a renewed passion. However, by the time she was in high school, she had decided that a life in the arts was probably not for her. By that time, she had dabbled in cello, chemistry, pollination ecology, pollen morphology, zoology, music theory, and exploding clay objects in kilns. Therefore, when it came time to select a college major, she decided on BOTANY. This major had many major advantages; it did not involve carrying around large, cumbersome objects, like cellos, doesn't smell as bad as chemistry, doesn't encourage bee stings like pollination ecology, doesn't bleed like zoology, rarely results in calls to the cops regarding strange noises (like music theory), and certainly is not as dangerous as blowing up objects in kilns. And the plants are so polite. They just sit there while you talk to them. She was rarely interrupted by a plant. So she thought. Her botanical career was uneventful, and she earned a BA in Botany at Cal State University, Los Angeles, where she discovered she loved "Botanizing". This involved going out into the wild, discovering plants she didn't know anything about, and using a botanical key to figure out what she had. She also started photographing wild flowers at this time, hoping someday to use these slides to teach others about the wild botanical world. She went on to work on an MS in Biology at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. There she studied fungi, until she discovered that she couldn't stand the slimy stuff, and began to search around for another career, especially since the opportunities for a botanical career in higher education seemed to disappear about this time, since college enrollment was plummeting. A friend suggested that since so many people got sick all the time, she might try her hand at easing their suffering by distracting their attention by providing incomprehensible paperwork for patients to read. This sounded quite boring, but heck it was a job. Donna began immediately to pay health insurance claims for a Major Medical Insurance Company. Since she became so adept at writing incomprehensible memos in the insurance community, she decided to move to the next obvious step, and begin writing incomprehensible programs for computers, and to that end, she began to work on a MS in Computer Science, which she eventually earned. She became so good at crashing computers in creative ways, that she was given a big raise and an ATTABOY. Now, you may think that, having reached this pinnacle of success, that she would relax and enjoy the fruits of her destructive tendencies. But this is when she got married and had a baby. A very ordinary thing. The extraordinary thing was that when she was at her desk one day, talking to a hydrangea plant (a throwback to her botany days), and she imagined that the plant was talking back. Now, I am not here to tell you that maybe the plant could communicate with her, but she did start seriously considering dusting off her drawing skills and adding additional painting and drawing skills to her toolbox. So, she painted her new baby, which actually was a new source of inspiration. And it turned out surprisingly well. And she got laid off because of the shrinking opportunities in the aerospace industry. And she decided to keep painting. And one day she realized that this really was what she could contribute to her fellow humans - a way of looking at the world in detail. She now paints watercolors and occasional oils in Altadena, California, USA, Earth. She has a new dog. The husband and child tolerate this all rather well, considering. |
| DUE TO REPEATED QUESTIONS REGARDING THE VERACITY OF THE ABOVE BIOGRAPHY, I HAVE PREPARED A SHEET LISTING ALL KNOWN ERRORS, PLEASE PUSH THE BUTTON |
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Send me e-mail: donna@barnesroberts.com
