Basking at the Beach
Under the Umbrella
Sea Cliff
Hot Summer Night
Patisserie
Donata Stern
“Evaluate yourself. Do what you are best at, what you enjoy. Anything is possible if you believe in yourself.”
Long Island, New York, is home to many successful artists. Notable among them is Donata Stern, a presence in the art world for decades. Having travel the world extensively, she has taken inspiration from everyday scenes, interpreting them in a transformative painting or sketched works of art.
Stern began to create whimsical artwork of various sports motifs, including flowers growing out of a golf bag and tennis racquets growing out of a pot of tulips while working as an apparel buyer.
As her reputation grew within the apparel industry, Stern adapted her paintings to clothing and small furnishings sold throughout the United States in boutiques, resorts, and major department stores. Bloomingdale’s invited Stern to design a model room in its flagship Manhattan store featuring a backdrop of two of her murals.
Painting is where Stern first made her mark. Much of Stern’s success has been her relentless energy. “Resourceful, imaginative and determined” is how journalist, Helene Herzig, described her in a 1977 profile in the periodical North Shore: The Magazine For Living On The Gold Coast.
Sonia Blair in a 1973 profile in North Shore Club Life wrote “To gaze upon a Donata canvas is to be virtually transported to a sunny field of flowers, vibrant and alive as nature itself”. In that article, Stern modestly added: “I’ll never set the art world on fire…but people do seem to like my paintings. It appears to be an emotional thing. Once they’ve decided to own one of my paintings, even if they resist at first, for one reason or another, they eventually succumb.”
And that has been the case for years, as Stern’s paintings have appeared in many venues, including the Nassau County Museum of Art, the Robley Gallery and Soho East, both in Roslyn. In addition, Stern’s work has been on exhibits at such popular galleries as Park South Gallery and Croquis Gallery, in New York City. Other exhibits have included those at Avnet Gallery, Great Neck; The Finer Things, Locust Valley; and Garvies Point Museum in Glen Cove.
For decades, her canvases have simply gone by the professional name of “Donata.”