Creative Types: Marianna McDonald

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Artist Marianna McDonald in her studio at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill. Photos by Tiffany Combs

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Artist Marianna McDonald in her studio at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill. Photos by Tiffany Combs

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Artist Marianna McDonald in her studio at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill. Photos by Tiffany Combs

When Marianna McDonald looks at colors, she sees more colors inside those colors.

“Like those trees,” she says, pointing to the green foliage in her backyard. “I might see yellow in them or some other colors.”

Looking around at the large-scale oils and pastels in McDonald’s cozy southside home studio or her studio at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, it’s easy to see what she’s talking about. Sweeping natural scenes are deepened by her eye for layers and color.

When I met her in her home studio in Lexington, she was at work on a large pastel landscape commissioned by Mt. Carmel Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Her soothing pastel landscapes are a hit on the hospital circuit and are displayed at numerous hospitals in the region, including St. Joseph, UK HealthCare and Owensboro Health Regional, to name a few.

She’s also a hit on the fair circuit, showing and selling her work at regional and national art fairs – including Lexington’s Woodland Art Fair, where her work has won the “Best of Drawing” award more than five times, and where she will display her work this month when the popular fair returns on Aug. 18-19.

McDonald cites the fair’s early days as helping jumpstart her current full-time art profession.

“I started with art fairs with the Lexington Art League back in the ’80s, before they ever did a juried show,” she explained. “We didn’t even have tents then – when it rained, you just got under a great-big piece of plastic.

“I remember sitting there one weekend where it rained all weekend, and we sat there in our little lawn chairs underneath our big pieces of plastic,” she said.

At the time, the pastel artist enjoyed participating in local art fairs, but her art took a back seat in 1988 when she “had to get a real job.”

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Artist Marianna McDonald has always drawn inspiration from nature and landscapes, so her studio at Shaker Village is fitting. In addition to pastels on canvas, the artist sometimes creates works on shingles of wood harvested from barns and other structures. Photos by Tiffany Combs

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“In 1988, I started working at the newspaper in the promotion department,” says McDonald.

“When I was there, occasionally I’d do an art fair, but sometimes it was just too much with my job and kids.”

Then, in 2001, McDonald was caught in a wave of downsizing at the Lexington Herald-Leader.

McDonald saw an opportunity.

“I thought ‘yeah, I’ll take your buyout’ – and then I started doing the art fairs real seriously,” says McDonald.

And that was the beginning of McDonald’s full-time art career. She began doing 12-15 art fairs a year and also became represented at local and regional galleries.

These days, she has scaled down to about five per year, in large part thanks to her gig at Shaker Village as a resident artist. As part of the program, which she was invited to join in 2014, McDonald shares a studio rent-free with another artist; they give 30 percent of their sales to Shaker Village in lieu of rent.

McDonald, whose love of nature is evident in her life and work, could not be happier with this arrangement.

“When I asked my husband what he thought of it – that it would be about a 30-minute drive a couple days a week – he said, ‘you’re already down there all the time, anyway,’” she said.

With Shaker craftsmanship having long influenced notable poets, artists, designers and architects, the artist-in-residence program helps provide a setting and space that fosters and inspires contemporary artists.

“I’d sat right in front of the building and sketched there before, so I knew what those windows were like,” McDonald said of the studio, which is located in the East Family Sister Shop on the east side of the village. The large windows shepherd loads of natural light into the studio.

McDonald tries to be in her studio a couple days a week, usually between Thursday and Sundays, and spends countless additional hours walking the grounds and sketching. Sometimes she goes out with her camera and photographs scenes and then comes back and sketches them; sometimes she works en plein air.

When she isn’t out in nature, especially in the winter, McDonald devotes some of her time to helping other pastel artists learn their craft, teaching a class each winter at Shaker Village. She finds joy in sharing what she’s gleaned from decades of practice as an artist.

“If you work on your values, if you make something as dark or as light as it needs to be, it doesn’t matter what color it is,” says McDonald.

Visit Marianna McDonald and her work this month at the following art fairs:

Woodland Art Fair

Woodland Park, 601 E. High St. • Saturday, Aug. 18, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. • Sunday, Aug. 19, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Shaker Village Craft Fair

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, 3501 Lexington Rd., Harrodsburg • Aug. 4-5 10 a.m.-5 p.m. both days

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After working in oils and watercolors, McDonald discovered the versatile world of soft pastels in 1982 and has concentrated on developing her expressive coloration to the landscape with pastels. Original artwork by Marianna McDonald

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