”The Resting Angel” © Zohar Zaied (zohar@pacific.net)
December 2004
Angels in Mendocino
Visionary artist Marco Donner paints spiritual encounters of angels, animals, and humans.
Charlotte Richardson
“Chickens represent humanity to me,” says Mendocino County artist Marco Donner, gesturing toward his painting of a rooster and an angel nestled tête-à-tête amidst red wildflowers. “The angel isn’t filled in completely. You know, angelic presences come and go. They’re there, and they’re not there.”
Donner and his English wife, classical cellist and pianist Abigail Summers, live with their three children in a straw-bale house with graceful arched windows and doors that Donner thinks of as a kind of chapel, a testament to a way of life. He designed and built it around a rock outcrop on a steep mountainside near Willits. “At all costs we should make things beautiful,” he says, “but it’s the inner beauty, how we are with each other, that I hope comes through in my work.”
Animals, humans, and angelic presences share a spiritual conversation in Donner’s art that is joyful and light-hearted: roosters overturn wine glasses and perch on the backs of barefoot monks; haloed madonnas rustle amidst giant sunflowers; and energetic angels boost saintly cows into flight. Chagall-like whimsy is balanced with allusions to flat-paint Byzantine icons and 15th-century Italian religious paintings. The artist William Blake also comes to mind, for Donner is clearly a visionary.
And yet, “Marco Donner’s work is disarmingly accessible,” says folk art expert Ginger Young of Ginger Young Gallery in Chapel Hill, N.C. “He captures the classical Old Master look but blends in more modern influences, especially the love of nature. His work has an overarching logic and coherence, grounded in his emphasis on the primacy of beauty in life.”
Donner grew up in the Los Altos hills, the son of a Stanford professor. He lived in Paris and London as a child and became disillusioned with American life as a teenager in the late 1960s.
With his parents’ blessing, he abandoned pre-med studies and sought an intuition-guided spiritual and artistic education. For a decade, he soaked up impressionism at the Jeu de Paume, studied Gaudi mosaics in Barcelona’s Parc Guell, meditated in Scotland’s ancient Iona community. Through a Tibetan lama at a Sufi center in Switzerland, he realized that his community was not any particular spiritual group, but the world.
Auspicious, unsolicited guidance blessed his path. An admiring young German artist introduced him to the backdoor guard at the École des Beaux Arts, and Donner spent a summer in the life-drawing auditorium of the famed Paris art school. Experiments in watercolor led to impressionistic oil landscapes and figurative work, with saintly beings and animals predominating. Along the way, he sold paintings to support himself.
A defining moment in Donner’s spiritual and artistic development came through his sister-in-law, a London architect who studied past life regression. “She led me deep into my psyche,” he reports. “I opened an arched door with an angel and a star above. I felt a wind and saw in a dark space a painting of the crucifixion. Gradually, I realized that I was witnessing the crucifixion itself. I was totally devastated, but I went through that whole lifetime.” Donner, who was already reading the Bible seriously, began painting the crucifixion from many angles.
“Witnessing the crucifixion explained to me the paintings I was doing, the angelic presences, the madonnas,” he says. “It’s such an emotional realm. I’m one of those people who seek visions and translate them into materiality. I paint in an altered state. I seem to walk into different lifetimes when I meditate. Painting is a way of bringing these experiences into the material world.”
Recently, a gothic arch Donner was painting recalled a moment in his youth, “both in time and out of it.” He was lying in the grass in England, “just gazing at some ancient arches,” very like the one on his canvas. Now that he has put the finishing touches on their home, a 14-year project, the family dreams of a longer-than-usual stint in Europe. Donner hopes to find a tumbled-down monastery or church that he can restore and perhaps fresco. Meanwhile, his present cloister is a nearby meadow, where he meditates daily between longer formal retreats. He’s already gathered stones for an arch he envisions there.
Charlotte Richardson lives in San Francisco and writes about the arts, travel, and cross-cultural issues for a variety of publications.
Artist Marco Donner can be reached at 3380 Williams Ranch Road, Willits CA 95490, or at marcodonner@saber.net.
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