Monica Macdonald's paintings are characterised by a vibrant use of color and exuberant markmaking. “My work is a celebration of the world around me - the landscape, the weather, the everyday stuff of life. My inspiration comes from these things but also from the sensuous qualities of the paint itself - from the color, the smell, the texture, and from the pleasure of making a mark.”

After an absence of 30 years Monica has recently moved back to her childhood home of Prince Edward Island. She creates her paintings in her studio by a tree lined lake. Her work is deeply rooted in the red soil of that landscape where for her “the distance between nature and art does not exist”.

Art critic and curator Ray Cronin has said of her work in a previous exhibition:

“The landscape of home is immensely powerful of course, made up as it is of equal parts memory, imagination and experience.... The world depicted in these paintings is stable, secure and very beautiful. It is tempting to think of them as a kind of sympathetic magic, an attempt to make real the heart's desire..... It's not nostalgia, however, that makes these works so interesting. Nostalgia is such a cheapened emotion, too common a currency for these paintings. This, rather, is reverie, the sort of daydream infused by desire and memory that somehow seems truer than mere reality.”

Monica studied at Sir Wilfred Grenfell School of Fine Art in Corner Brook NF and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax NS where she received her Bachelor of Fine Art in 1996. Her work is hanging in numerous private and corporate collections, including 24 Sussex Drive, the official residence of the Prime Minister.