Arts of the Terrace award winner at MLT Library

The Mountlake Terrace Arts Commission presents an exhibit of work by artist Donna Jean Perry, the winner of the 2006 Arts of the Terrace City Purchase Award, at the Mountlake Terrace Library through the month of April.

All her life Perry has had a fascination with collage. It’s a fascination she wants to share with others. “I find it vastly interesting, with endless combinations of materials and media,” said the Bellevue native. “My imagination provides the subject — mood, feeling or idea. Then I select the materials that best express that subject. A collage can be so highly textured with rolled or crushed papers, raised sections, and metal fragments and wires that it almost becomes a sculpture.”

Beginning at the age of 8, Perry studied with her mother, an accomplished watercolorist, and with a number of private instructors. She studied art at the University of Puget Sound and received teaching certificates for Washington and Illinois. She taught high school art in the Chicago area and later worked for a Chicago interior design firm before moving back to Seattle in 1973.

Perry has worked in a variety of media including charcoal, pen and ink, watercolor, acrylic and fabric painting. She developed a technique for painting on fabric using dyes, acrylics, India ink and a wax seal. For the past several years she has worked primarily in collage, a medium that supports a greater diversity in materials, techniques and personal expression. She shows her work at local and national shows, public art exhibits, galleries, and museums. She teaches individual and small group workshops in her Bothell studio.

A member of the National Collage Society and the Northwest Collage Society, Perry was on the Board of Directors for the Eastside Association of Fine Arts. She has been chairperson for the Botanical Gardens art show and coordinator of the art exhibits at the historic Winters House.