Donna Eichel

James Bay Art Walk artist profile

By Anne Hansen

There's a striking, two-dimensional life sized metal sculpture of a human figure in Donna Eichel's backyard garden, created years ago by Donna herself. Her husband Scott remembers how it was assembled, since the whole family helped out. "Donna the welder would be cussing like a longshoreman, trying to hold those parts together," he chuckles.

Thankfully, Donna did not pay heed to a sculpture professor in one of her classes at the University of Manitoba. He advised that, "after menopause, women should play bridge or go shopping."

After hitchhiking around Europe with women friends, Donna trained as a nurse, first at the University of Saskachewan, followed later by study at McGill University and teaching at the Montreal General Hospital. Back then, art did not play much of a role in her life.

At age 30, "doors opened" for her through some great teachers at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She was living in Halifax while her kids were approaching their teenage years and her husband pursued his aviation career. That's when she gave up nursing completely. Donna has been all over the map, literally. The family has also lived in Winnipeg and Ottawa. She was heavily involved in the Ottawa arts community, helping to establish an arts warehouse, "The Enriched Bread Artists," that still exists. Donna remains in touch with some of those artists. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Ottawa.

Donna's childhood was spent on a farm near Lloydminster, Alberta, where there was "no time for book-reading or art," although her father played the jazz piano. She went to school by horse. She remembers "You worked. It was either gardening, bringing in the cows for milking, tending the horses, or shoveling grain at harvest time."

Donna never joined the 4-H Club, known worldwide as an agriculturally-based experiential learning organization for youth. But she applies what she calls 3-H principles to her art work: head, heart and hands.

She is captivated by abandoned, derelict sites, such as farms and shipyards, where there's plenty of rust and scrap laying around. There are lots of earth-tones in her work, as well as red. One of her artistic influences is Gerhard Richter who, according to Wikipedia, is the world's top-selling living artist. He is known for his over-painted photographs, abstracts, sculptures and glass works.

Although Donna's work has an abstract quality to it, many of her ideas begin with a photograph or sketch of actual objects. Her tools and media include paint, huge brushes, squeegees, beeswax, Mylar, Plexiglas, and aluminum. "I love hardware stores," she says, pointing to a vast array of gadgets on her workbench. Surface and texture are key elements in her creations.

Visit Donna Eichel's backlit art projects and other works on the James Bay Art Walk, September 14 & 15, 2013.