J.T. Donovan is a fine art painter who uses the color spectrum and geometric patterning to organize his compositions.  Donovan uses oil paint over a flat acrylic base.  Both layers are mixed by the artist with careful attention to the exact intensity, value, and hue of the color.  His canvases are rectangular, square, and sometimes shaped to conform to irregular geometric arrangements.  The compositions sometimes use transparent “overlapping” or more often are the result of systematic progressions.  Donovan’s colors are carefully controlled to relate to one another.  The relationships between the colors are meant to communicate an interconnectedness that is all around us in today’s increasingly technological society.  Donovan thinks of his art as visual poetry.  For him it is the communication between artist and viewer that promotes the spirit.  His compositions are relatively simple and elicit a primal response…what looks simple goes much deeper.

A spontaneous journey leads our minds from the bright color sequences to an experience of wonder and excitement.

Donovan was born in Brooklyn, New York.  He studied art at Parsons School of Design and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1982.  It was at Parsons School of Design,  where he studied color with Jim Parker,  that Donovan began to realize the potential of color as an art form.  Soon after graduating from Parsons, he meets and works with Al Held and Donald Judd, two major figures in the art world.  Donovan alters his color palette after seeing Richard Lohse’s system-based paintings in Judd’s Mercer street building in the 1980’s.  Judd, a leader in the Minimalist art movement observed that color had a great amount of untapped potential in the future of art.  Lohse’s assertion that serial color painting is a new language resonates in Donovan’s work.

Color is a language – part science and part art.  The language of art is always changing and reflecting the world we live in.  It is with the use of a systematized color palette that Donovan relates his worldview for all of us to witness and consider.  The discovery and thrill of looking reminds us of what it means to be alive.