Sanctuary
Mission Door

About the Painting

The door fills the left half of the painting, a tall wooden panel under an arch of small bricks, with an opening of vertical bars across its upper section. The wood is painted in browns and golds with fine vertical lines for the grain, and a strip of soft turquoise runs along the frame at the right.

Around the door, the wall is built from large rounded stones and smaller bricks, painted in ochre, gold, rust and umber. Donna lets the wall’s color move freely, with spatters, drips and soft blooms of pigment that suggest weathered plaster and old stone. Deep shadows between the large stones give the wall its weight.

At the foot of the door, small plants with white and yellow flowers grow in the sandy ground, and thin grasses rise along the base of the wall. The light falls from the upper left, warming the arch and the upper wall and leaving the lower stones in a deeper amber. A thin shadow falls across the upper part of the door from the arch above it. A small red latch and a few dark nail heads mark the door at the right, the details of a door that has opened and closed many times.

The title, Sanctuary Mission Door, names a doorway of welcome, and the painting gives it the warm colors of old stone in full sun. The painting hangs in the Texas Places collection with the River Walk, the Gruene porch and the South Llano River. The bars across the top of the door are painted in deep red and rust, with the light falling between them in thin pale lines.

Donna signs her name at the lower right, in the sunlit ground. Enlarge the painting to follow the many layers of color in the wall, each one adding a little more age and warmth to the stone.