Island artist Donna Botten likes to paint portraits, but not of people she knows. Capturing the exact image of a person to tell their story through watercolor on paper is something she does, and does well, but it’s not what keeps her coming back to the easel.
“Sometimes when I do commissions people want them to look a certain way, but what feeds my soul is to take a blank piece of paper and someone I don’t know and just go for it,” she said.
Part of going for it means teasing out the subtle play of light and dark on her subject and how that duality informs the image. She looks for expression, posture and composition, but most of all “the light has to be right. It has to be a good time of day, so you are looking at dark and light because that’s what makes it come together, dark and light,” she said.
It’s also why the jurors for “Splash 18,” the annual book of master watercolorists, chose Botten’s portrait, “Spectator,” for publication in this year’s edition — “Splash 18: Celebrating Light and Dark.”
“Spectator” is an apt title for Botten’s watercolor as the painting’s subject is of a spectator at last year’s Northwest Regional Dressage competition that Botten attended to watch her daughter compete. While everyone was gawking at the $90,000 to $100,000 horses, Botten’s eye was drawn to the shadows and light on the face of someone she didn’t know.
“The woman was standing with a group of people,” she said. “You can see the horses reflected in her glasses. I was snapping away, and when I got back home, I went through the photos. Out of all of the pictures I took, this was it.”
Unlike her more technical paintings of tractors and cars — in which she approaches the image like “piecing a puzzle together” by taking one aspect and working on it before moving on to another — the portraits are done in washes and more quickly.
Still, a single portrait may take anywhere from two weeks to a month because each of the multiple layers of color she lays down has to dry before the next layer is applied.
“It is time consuming, but you want many layers as that is what glows through: the many layers,” she said.
Botten’s expertise is evident in her paintings, and she teaches two days a week in her home studio, but the artist never attended art school. Her knowledge comes from taking workshops by renowned watercolor artists Ted Nuttal and Mary Whyte and having drawn since she was a child growing up on Vashon.
“I could have flunked out of grade school because drawing is all I did,” she said. “I drew people and horses and continued until I got married.”
With a busy family life that included two children who were passionate about riding — not drawing — horses, Botten put away her paints and picked up crafts — knitting, quilting, Norwegian Rosemaling — “you name it, I’ve done it,” she said.
In 1989, she did her first watercolor portrait but again put away her paints, this time for another 10 years. That was when life intervened.
“I always thought I had time to (paint),” she said. “But in 1999, I had breast cancer, and that was a wake-up call. Two things happened: the cancer and my aunt.”
Her aunt Jan, who turned 92 in July, asked Botten to paint her portrait.
“I did because you don’t say ‘no’ to Aunt Jan,” Botten said with a laugh. “I painted her and between that and the breast cancer, I realized we don’t have forever. You never know what’s going to happen.”
Such as when she picked up her phone a couple of months ago, and to her great surprise, heard a friend say, “Did you know your painting ‘Spectator’ is in Watercolor Magazine?”
Unbeknownst to Botten, the publishers of “Splash 18” submitted the piece to the magazine.
“I feel so blessed,” Botten said.
And while she feels the blessings, she also puts in the long hours before her easel. She said she’ll get up in the morning and start to paint while still in her pajamas. All of a sudden, it’s 5 p.m.
“And where did the day go?” she said. “When you paint, you immerse yourself in it. You have no negative thoughts. It is like therapy, it feeds your soul and helps your mind. I highly recommend it.”
