Donna Avedisian
Donna Avedisian is an abstract visual artist of Armenian descent with Midwest roots, now based in the Pacific Northwest, where she has lived for more than two decades. She grew up in a household that valued disciplined thinking, hard work, community engagement, and the arts, particularly music and visual practice. Her engagement with color and creative expression began early and continued through formal training. She earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and completed her undergraduate studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
From childhood through her education, Avedisian was closely drawn to outdoor environments. She spent long periods painting and drawing in Wisconsin farmland, Boston parks, and Rhode Island wetlands. Over time, her abstract work shifted away from depicting objects and toward expressing what she describes as the verbs of nature: movement, energy, and elemental force. Rather than representing landscapes directly, her paintings explore action, atmosphere, and the tension between what is considered natural and what is labeled artificial.
In her studio practice, Avedisian approaches abstraction as a form of visual language rather than spontaneous inspiration. She is deliberate about what needs to be communicated through color and form. As she explains, “For me it’s not about inspiration. It’s about communication, about working through the complexity that’s already surrounding us.” This emphasis on communication underpins her sustained investigation into how abstract imagery can carry meaning without narrative specificity.
After more than a decade devoted primarily to raising her three children, Avedisian returned to a focused studio practice in 2018. That return came with a heightened sensitivity to both color and context. She found herself drawn to specific and sometimes unexpected color combinations, as though she were mixing pigments internally before they reached the canvas. At the same time, her work began reflecting a stronger awareness of social and political forces, marking a shift from the concerns that shaped her earlier work.
Her painting bloomEnfolding, published by PJAS, belongs to a series that examines journalism through abstraction. In this body of work, Avedisian responded to news articles by considering what remained unspoken or visually excluded. Rather than imagining what lies beyond the frame of an accompanying photograph, she focused on what might exist beneath it conceptually, searching for the underlying context or tension that gives a story its weight.
In 2019, Avedisian began working in a vertical format that deliberately restricts the visual field. She associates this format with structures used for sharing written information, likening it to an elongated sheet of paper that remains finite despite its extension. Following the November 2024 election, this vertical series evolved further. The paintings now begin with horizontal red and blue pencil lines, sometimes pressed firmly into the surface, sometimes barely touching it, sometimes intersecting and sometimes remaining isolated. Through these gestures, her work continues to explore connection and division, proximity and boundary.
Across her practice, Avedisian remains committed to abstraction as a means of thinking through color, form, and contemporary life. Her paintings operate as quiet but deliberate visual communications, shaped by lived experience and sustained observation, while holding space for the possibility of greater understanding and peace.
