DONALDSON, ANTONY (British, b.1939)

Although Donaldson was not part of the 1958-63 generation of Royal College of Art students who established Pop Art as a movement at the 1961 Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London, his early friendship with Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips linked him directly to the group of artists who established the movement by the mid-1960s.
In 1962, Donaldson developed the simplified treatment of the female figure that typified his work over the next half decade. Youthful, shapely, sexually confident, these women strike flirtatious poses and reveal themselves almost wantonly to the viewer’s gaze. Even when clothed in their bathing suits, or when showing us nothing more than their faces, it is the exposed surface of their perfect flesh that one first notices. Their facial features are barely sketched in or depicted in a generalized way, to emphasise the fact that these are not portraits of particular individuals but fantasy images formed in the mind of a young man.
These depictions of beach beauties, strippers and starlets bask in the prospect of pleasure, of an existence characterised by never-ending relaxation and leisure, and as such they perfectly capture the mood of the time - the demands for the good life after the greyness and deprivations of the immediate post-war years. Like Hockney, Donaldson dreamt of a sun-drenched, laid-back southern California life and settled in Los Angeles 1966-1968. The bold simplicity of his compositional schemes and the central role accorded to flat areas of saturated colour were confirmed by his American experience.

Public collections include:
Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Contemporary Art Society, London
Foundation Stuyvesant
Olinda Museum, Brazil
Porto Alegre Museum, Brazil
Tate, London
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool