Donna Surprenant brings a unique range of experience and abilities to the task. Years of academic training have honed her skills as a perceptual realist to a fine point and produced an intense painterly discipline superbly matched to her acute powers of observation and concentration.

Importantly, Donna makes no use of photography for preparatory studies or reference, but insists on painting directly from the still life objects themselves. This gives her work a quality rarely found in modern representational painting with its usually heavy reliance on photography.

Donna’s paintings reflect an experiential wholeness drawn from a pre-photographic era, modeled on the great Dutch still lifes of the seventeenth century, the limpid interiors of Vermeer and the quiet domestic elegies of Chardin.

Like them, the fall of light upon the objects in her paintings is rendered with remarkable precision, sensitivity, and grace, revealing an awareness not only of its physical nuances and subtleties, but an appreciation of its spiritual qualities as well.

As a member of a religious community, Donna Surprenant is uniquely qualified to appreciate these aspects of the genre. She understands, in a way that few contemporary artists can, the implicit sense of revelation that has always underpinned these exquisite surfaces.

In her hands, the act of painting, always an act of faith, is a vocation rather than a profession. In that sense we can interpret her still lifes as a joyous expression of that religious life and view these simple tabletops and the humble objects arranged upon them as a celebration of beauty in all its dimensions.

After all, even still life is about life—about pleasure and delight, inner intensity and joy….

—From the foreword to the brochure for the solo exhibit in the Abbozzo Gallery, Oakville, Ontario, of Donna’s "stilled life" paintings, October 13-28, 2007.

[See some of Donna Surprenant’s paintings.]