Donna Huber Art Studio - visit the print studio in Lund, BC.

"A tour in the mid-seventies through the First Nations’ art exhibit in the BC Museum in Victoria electrified me. I loved the spirit-based images and the way designs are passed down from one generation to another. I loved the clean, brilliantly conceived images that seemed to perfectly express the deliberate mystery of the natural world. I admire this same clean briefness in Japanese and Inuit art. I love Amish quilts and wood block printed Japanese fabrics."

"Both my mother and her father were artistic. My Swede-Finn grandfather, Carl Franzin, only painted in his spare time, his trade was boat building. His shop, was located on the beach in Lund." Photo-circa 1944

I was born in Vancouver, BC, on June 17, 1954. The first of four children, my mother and father lived, at that time, in Pender Harbour, where my father owned a small fishing boat. When I was three, the family moved to the village of Lund in 1957. Mother was raised in Lund, a third generation Scandinavian on her fathers’ side. Lund was founded by Swedes and Finns, and named after a town in Sweden.

From the age of three until the last years of high school, I lived there. The next town, Powell River, was twenty miles away, and until I was 7 or 8,the road was unpaved. My childhood was spent in almost complete freedom; Lund kids went into the woods, fooled around in creeks and went rowing on the ocean in our own little boats.
My mother was also an artist; during my childhood she worked in oils at an easel set up in the living room. Her local landscapes and boat paintings sold successfully over the years.

After I graduated high school, I enrolled in the Vancouver School of Art, where I stayed for two years, studying photography, design foundation and printmaking. Later, I took a year of printmaking instruction from Michael Friedman at the Malaspina campus in Powell River.

When I moved, in 1986, now with my own small family, back to Lund, I joined up with my mother, and we opened Huber Ink. This was a two-person studio-gallery located on mom and dads’ property over looking Finn Bay, which is just around the harbour from Lund. We ran the gallery together for ten years, featuring original, hand-pulled prints, watercolour and acrylic paintings, until mom became ill with cancer, and sadly died, at the age of 63. During those ten years, we participated in small shows at local and regional galleries, and group exhibits around the lower mainland, as well as hosting openings each spring to herald the beginning of a new season of work in our own gallery.

The life-style in this area of the coast is very favourable to artists. There are quiet forests to wander in, the ocean is always inspirational, and the isolation and lack of industry means there are precious few distractions.

Artist Review - by Laura Walz

Mystery of Life

Lund artist opens a new studio displaying her exploration
of humans and their relationship to the world

A new studio for Powell River artist Donna Huber provides a perfect room of her own with stunning views of Hernando and Savary islands and the Strait of Georgia. In the last year, Huber has created an impressive number of paintings in a burst of creativity which has driven her work to a new level. She says she has been driven by the dramatic and challenging changes occurring in the world. “There is a creeping unease right now,” she says. Her paintings tap into the heightened insecurity surrounding humanity and the tension between the known and the unknown world. Yet just by the act of creation, by the fact that she captures the essence of that anxiety surrounding people, her work transcends despair, hopelessness or fear.

Her paintings depict dream- or folk-like images that show humans interacting with the world beyond consciousness, one that is simultaneously liberating and frightening. Some images portray the ultimately futile struggle to contain chaos. Like the woman in one of Huber’s paintings picking up and laying down sticks in a neat bundle, people are driven to bolster their lives with order to attain security.

The figures in her work represent humanity and they often have their backs to the viewer or minimal features. Huber paints people that way in order to represent “the mystery of who we are and what we are up to,” Huber says. “I don’t want the viewer to be distracted by facial expressions or features. It’s human experience.” In some paintings the people are alone. In others , they appear in pairs, or groups, because, as Huber says, we only have each other in the mystery that is life.
Many of her paintings contain images of water or snow, which represents “the humming possibility, the buzz of possibility.” She has paintings of babies, bundled in a blanket and asleep in a basket. In one a baby in a blanket hovers over a basket. “How does it get in there?” Huber asks.

Huber employs a mixed medium, using both acrylic and watercolours. While she has fine tuned her own vision and style, she is interested in Japanese, Inuit and First Nation work. “That’s not where I draw from, but it is the kind of art that stirs me. I understand those artists, I know how they think.”

As well as original paintings, Huber produces lino prints, pen and ink drawings and art cards. The printing press on which she makes her lino prints is in the studio as well.

Story by Laura Walz, editor for the Powell River newspaper -The Peak