Donna Schaffer came to Dry Creek Valley 17 years ago, refugee from an intense career in advertising in Silicon Valley working particularly for Apple Computer and Intel. She served as Director on the Board of the Dry Creek Valley Association until a few years ago, and during her tenure she created and maintained our first website.

 Donna brought with her from the ad agency a strong bent for graphics, and has been leaning in that direction ever since. Her passion is oil painting, her focus is on two subjects: scuba diving and the finny world, and pastoral landscapes around her beloved home that is now Dry Creek Valley.

Upon retirement, Donna plunged into the local world of art taking all the courses in the Santa Rosa Junior College Art Department plus classes in the new field of web design which she hoped to be useful in promoting her new hobby. Especially fond of plein aire painting, she began the routine she keeps up to this day of capturing landscape images on location a couple of times a week.

Asked to discuss her painting technique, Donna described her transition "from loose and sloppy to more detailed, combining realism with a touch of expressionism". She works with oil paints, instead of the ever more popular acrylics, because they are thicker, dry more slowly, and have more stable colors; "it feels like sculpting the landscape".

Donna's original work can be found at local galleries, including Upstairs at Levin & Co. on Center Street in Healdsburg. She can often be found bent over her laptop at the Healdsburg Wolf Coffee, plying her second trade of web design for which she has a number of clients. On the walls surrounding the makeshift desk of her "internet office" are reproductions of a number of her paintings.

Visit Donna's online galley for a virtual trip through Dry Creek Valley and the neighboring countryside. Or visit Wolf Coffee to say hello.