Fur and Feathers, Spines and Scales, Pods and Petals:
The Artwork of Donna Gaylord
December 7, 2006 – January 22, 2007

By Vicki Donkersley, Curator of Exhibitions

Quite simply, Tucsonan Donna Gaylord relishes the act of drawing.  With pencil in hand, putting the sharpened tip to paper and making the marks that describe the shapes, textures and essence of objects, Donna conjures up her images with the gift of a magician.  Although she is best known for her intricate works rendered in colored pencils, she is comfortable working in a variety of different media, including graphite, basically an ordinary pencil; pastel; ink; gouache, an opaque water-based medium; and silver point, a technique dating back to the Middle Ages where the artist literally uses fine silver wire as a drawing implement to create precise lines and delicate tones on a drawing surface.

Colored pencil is a laborious medium.  It requires layers and layers of strokes applied by hand, building up new colors from bottom to top to achieve values and tonal changes.  It demands control and precision in handling.  Using different techniques of blending and layering, Gaylord creates images that are a tapestry of line, color and texture.

Our exhibit features a group of Donna’s artworks that express her love for the Sonoran Desert .  Gaylord explains, “My work is about nature. I do not strive for photo realism though I consider myself to be a realist. I focus more on representing the natural world through line, pattern and color.  It is an adventure to put nature’s images in new surroundings, to treat them in a whimsical fashion, to invent a border around an image, and to take ‘artistic license’ with color.”  

Many of the works created by Donna through the years have been inspired by the plants and animals at Tohono Chul Park .  Shortly after the Park opened to the public in the mid-1980s, Gaylord joined the volunteer staff.  She was one of the first graduates of the Park’s docent program and has spent hours leading visitors on informative tours of the gardens.  She was instrumental in organizing the Park’s original summer children’s programs and has conducted periodic art workshops over the years. 

Gaylord has shown her work in a number of exhibits at Tohono Chul Park and four of her artworks are included in Tohono Chul’s permanent collection. She has designed two original artworks that were reproduced as posters for the Park, the more recent one to celebrate Tohono Chul’s 20^th anniversary in 2005.

Donna knows the Park intimately. She has walked the grounds, carefully studied the flora and fauna, photographed it in different seasons, and has come to know the special stories of the Park, some that are captured in her work on display. 

Russ’ Rescue, a portrait of the Park’s treasured crested saguaro, pays homage to Plants Curator, Russ Buhrow, who played a role in acquiring the rare cactus for Tohono Chul’s botanical collection.  In October

Petals, Pods and Pecarries, by Donna Gaylord. colored pencil

Russ' Rescue, by Donna Gaylord.
colored pencil and goauche on
Bristol board

The Prized Crested Saguaro as it looks today (photo by Glenn Nowak)

Struggle, by Donna Gaylord

1997, the saguaro was rooted in a gravel pit at Granite Construction Company, a lingering desert survivor on land being used for company business.  Understanding the need to preserve the saguaro, the company offered to donate it to the Park, with the proviso that the Park staff dig it out, and provide transport.  With the expertise of Jim Ingram of Catalina Cactus and his specialized saguaro hauling truck, the cactus was moved to a ridge at the Park and carefully nursed for two years to ensure its continued health.  The distinctive saguaro can be seen upon entry of the Park and from the Saguaro Loop Trail.  In Donna’s rendition, she has depicted the cactus sentinel occupied by a trio of Harris’ hawks. 

A pair of images, Tohono Chul’s Visitor #1 and #2, are inspired by another true life circumstance at the Park.  In the winter of 1992, a gray fox wandered into the Park, staked out a tree near a busy confluence of pathways, climbed into its crook, and proceeded to take a nap.  He continued this routine for several months until the crowds of people gathering to watch him disturbed his slumber.  One day he simply disappeared back into the desert.

Tohono Chul Legacy is a piece that Gaylord created to celebrate the Park’s 20^th Anniversary in 2005.  The central panel is devoted to the Queen of the Night, a cereus that blooms but one night a year, transforming the stick-like cactus into a bountiful bouquet of palm-sized fragrant blossoms.  Tohono Chul has one of the largest public collections of Peniocereus greggi, so it is fitting that the flowering specimen is the focal point of the artwork.  Of particular interest is the way Donna creates a frame for the central image using a menagerie of birds and shrubs, blossoms and butterflies, lizards and mammals, showing the way plants and animals are interdependently linked.  This unique approach of creating a composition within a compelling “frame” is a distinctive characteristic of many of Donna’s images.

Gaylord uses a similar framework of blossoms, fruit, woody cholla skeleton, and antelope ground squirrels around the central focal point in Barrel’s Crowning Achievement. In this piece, Donna has captured the eye-dazzling shapes and textures of nature itself.  Her rendering of the unusual crested barrel cactus shows the twisting pleats of the crown.  In addition, she has applied hundreds of vertical lines, with intermittent breaks, creating an exciting blue background that contrasts with the cactus.  Competing with 900 entries, this masterpiece received the highest award given by the Colored Pencil Society of America, the CIPPY Award, and the Bruynzell Fullcolor Prize for Outstanding Recognition as well, in the Society’s 1998 international colored pencil exhibition.

In Who? The Intruder?, Donna celebrates the interplay of line, shape, texture and shadow and dazzles us with a composition that is as much about camouflage as it is about the playful close encounter of a lizard and bobcat.  In a similar vein, Palo Verde Palace is a study of positive and negative space where she creates the green web of tree branches against an interesting network of white background spaces.  Nestled within the arrangement is a family of five owls.

In her approach to each new work of art, Donna first conceives the visual idea for the arrangement of the composition, deciding on the subjects to be depicted.  She then leafs through her collection of photographs of desert plants and animals selecting those that she will use as a simple reference for textures, colors and forms.  Finally, she makes decisions about the overall color palette for the work. Completing the work is a time-consuming task that may take days, weeks or even months.

Gaylord seems to enjoy the challenges of using her medium in new ways.  Although many compositions are strictly colored pencil, she also experiments with the application of colored pencil on pastel board and colored papers while also combining the pencils with gouache and other media.  The bright yellow petals of cone flowers are rendered in gouache and colored pencil on black paper in Kirstin’s Flowers.  Similarly, the magenta blossoms on a cactus in her own backyard are the subject she renders on pastel board in Spring’s Splendor of Petals and Spines! A portrait of a peregrine falcon is depicted in water soluble pencils, watercolor and dry pencil in The Observer.  In How About that Stalk!, Gaylord mixes colored pencil with gouache, ink and pastel.

Gaylord received her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Fine Arts from the University of Colorado in Boulder , but has been a resident of Tucson since 1979.  She is a signature member of the Colored Pencil Society of America and served as the president of the Arizona chapter for four years.  Over the years her work has been presented in state, national and international exhibitions.

Donna’s work is a loving tribute to what she observes and appreciates in nature itself.  In arranging the fur and feathers, spines and scales, pods and petals, she creates intriguing compositions that invite us to look more closely, too. Her enthusiasm is infectious.  Through her work, we all can marvel at the beauty and mystery in our desert surroundings.