Olivia Donovan

In my work, I convey and accentuate the feelings I get from faces, bodies, and nature through an abstract language. Plants and figures are living organisms and their movements can be manipulated and abstracted. I create fantastical spaces in my work with the manipulation of light, color shape, and form. 

When starting my pieces I work from a few photographic sources and sometimes a video of bodies or face moving. My digital work, as well as my paintings, are dream-like abstractions and metamorphoses of the lives of humans, other animals, and plant life combined. We don’t visit nature or even live in it, we are of nature, a product of it, we cannot be without it. I physically show and combine forms of nature and beings to express this connection we have and I feel, not only physically when breathing in oxygen in a forest or eating berries from a bush but when walking down my road, feeling comforted, encouraged and happy. I feel as if I am in my mother's arms; needed and wanted as part of this world that was created with the intention for me to be here. 

My goal is to follow my hand as it wants to, be true to myself, and often my instincts are to manipulate faces, colors, form, and Earth. My instinct is to be wild, to follow Earth’s growths, life, and patterns as it relates to my life and relationship with it.  
The metamorphosis and patterns of human/beings and Earth matter are closely related and grow together, we need Earth, we are Earth. We have an entangled interconnected link to nature and without it, we could not exist.