Donaldo Paintings
  Don Voelker, Donaldo, Painter

Costa Rica Exposiciones / Exhibitions

Email : dvoelker@hotmail.com
English / Spanish
 

Now, after 17 years learning to paint while retired to Costa Rica, I am fulfilling the life-long dream of being an artist… and even, occasionally, selling an oil painting or two. And like the French artist Paul Gauguin, I get to interpret a tropical land and culture from my lens as a painter from the northern latitudes. As a foreigner in Costa Rica, I believe that I see things that, often, the native artists tend to overlook, as these are things are too commonplace, like the hanging flor de Itabo, a Puntarenas ferry, and wooden worker houses of the old banana fincas.

And I revel in modern art history. I have numerous influences, or rather, favourite artists, none of whom I can emulate in my work. Certainly, the French post-impressionists are the core favourites: Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne. I find no fault with the Fauvists and German Expressionists, who followed Van Gogh. In my travels in South America, I discovered the Uruguayans Joaquin Torres Garcia and Rafael Barradas, who were geometrical in their depictions. And I can relate to Canada´s Group of Seven.

My training as a historian pushes me to render my subjects as characteristic of Costa Rica and Latin America in the place and date painted. In this regard, I hope that my paintings provide historical documentation of Costa Rica and Latin America in the early 21st Century.