Flowering Dogwood
Pink Blossoms
on Woody Bark

About the Painting

The blossoms gather along a pair of warm brown branches that cross the sheet from the lower left to the upper right, so the eye climbs the painting the way it would climb a tree in spring. Each flower turns at its own angle, some facing the viewer and some shown in profile, which gives the bough the feel of a living thing caught in a breeze.

The ground behind the branches is a soft sky of pale blue, rose and gold, where the colors meet and melt into one another with feathered edges. Against that softness, Donna sets the petals with crisp edges, and a lighter pink laid beside a deeper rose gives each petal its curl. The warmest notes, coral and orange, sit near the center of the sheet, and the color cools to pink and lavender toward the edges, which keeps the eye returning to the middle of the bough. Small strokes of violet and gold mark the hearts of the larger blossoms.

The leaves carry their own range of blue, teal and green, and several are lit almost white along one side, as though the sun has found them through the branches. The bark is warm brown with a darker stroke along its shaded side, enough to make each branch read as round. Donna signs the painting in the lower right corner, tucked among the last blossoms.

In the flowering dogwood, the showy blossom is a cluster of small true flowers framed by four bracts that look like petals. One garden form, called Rubra, carries pink flowers, the color Donna names in her title.

Seen across a room, the painting reads as one bright bough against a spring sky. Enlarged in the viewer, each blossom opens into layers of pink over rose over the white of the paper.