Donna Feneley is a Sydney-based landscape artist who completed a Master of Art, majoring in painting, at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, in 2013. Since then, she has been a finalist in several art competitions and exhibited across Sydney, including solo exhibitions at Hazelhurst Arts Centre and Duckrabbit, which led to a number of commissioned works.

Donna’s paintings explore atmosphere, light and emotion within the Australian landscape. In many of her works, darkness dominates the terrain, interrupted by splinters of light or a sliver of sun breaking through looming skies, suggesting both stillness and turbulence within the landscape. Her works are often shaped by memories of childhood on the Hay Plains, where vast horizons and dramatic skies influenced her connection to place. She is drawn to capturing moments that feel both whimsical and deeply personal, such as lying on a riverbank and looking up through the trees into an endless sky. The child is never present within the painting itself; instead, the viewer becomes the child, immersed within the scene.

Often absent of people, Donna’s landscapes invite the viewer to be alone within the space. Her paintings can feel at once foreboding yet inviting, moving between imagined worlds and deeply familiar places. Some works are inspired by real landscapes, while others emerge entirely from memory and imagination, ranging from the illusory to the hyper-real through loose, expressive brushwork and layered oil paint. Donna often begins with a thin red cadmium underpainting to create warmth beneath the surface before gradually building translucent layers that shape the final composition.

These themes of light, isolation, memory and atmosphere have preoccupied Donna’s practice for many years, inspired by both her wanderings through dark places and her childhood in the Australian outback.