Kaye Donachie is a British figurative painter with a deliberately limited color palette. Her work is usually monochromatic or bichromatic, with highly saturated spots of color that seem to glow off the painting's surface.

How heavy the days, 2006

Donachie renders very sparsely, so there is a quick and light quality to her figures that I find very pretty. She keeps them looking mysterious, with her favored dawn/dusk lighting serving more to show off the beauty of her geometric simplifications than to illuminate any distinguishing details. These human impressions are often idealized with dreamy expressions and contemplative postures, recalling a kind of love-struck hypnotism common to old romance flicks and neoclassical portraiture. 

Dusk shed by a lamp brightens the tears, 2009

Anchored by day, drawn in at night, 2010 

Clouds are pushing in grey reluctance, 2009

Donachie also does ambitious works that are slightly more naturalistic or that include a multitude of figures. However, I find these paintings a little uninteresting. Without the aesthetic strength of a solitary figure with a pleasing simplification of shape, Donachie's works don't have any apparent content to them, and whatever story is being told has no interesting twist. It's sad to say that throwing in some non sequiturs would put them on par with some of the stuff I've looked at over the semester.

The Epiphany, 2002

Early Morning Hours Of The Night, 2003

Which leads me to think about something: I've noticed throughout this semester how much I love atmosphere-dense imagery, but it's also a little frustrating to see how content plays a secondary role in these. "Ambiguity" sometimes makes me suspicious; are the works ambiguous or unresearched? It's great to see artists painting what they want to paint, but it also feels insubstantial when they don't venture outside their own aesthetics. I do recognize that being an individual with concentrated focus and style is sort of the point of fine art, but it somehow feels unfair to celebrate something that's more or less innate. Dana Schutz stands out to me as someone who tries a lot of concepts and I really like her for it, even when the works aren't as pretty or atmospheric as Donachie's.