The artist began painting later in life after retiring from the family business. She creates portraits in pencil, charcoal, pastel or oil, and paints landscapes and still lifes in oil.

Donatella received her degree in economics from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and was president and CEO of Tecnavia, a company in Barbengo-Lugano, Switzerland and Minnesota, that manufactures computer hardware and software for applications in meteorology, pre-press and currently especially archiving and e-publishing of formatted newspapers and documents.

Donatella is a longtime member of the Lugano Soroptimist Club.

Donatella was born in Milan and spent her early childhood in America. After return to Italy and living much of her life in Milan, she moved with her family to Lugano, Switzerland, in 1975. Many years later she would return to the United States where she studied art in Minnesota. Although Donatella’s interest in the visual arts and music was intensely fostered by her parents in childhood, she discovered her talent as a painter more recently in her more leisure years after her three children grew up and settled in their lives and work, and following her retirement from the business world.

A particular influence in her emerging artistic awareness was the widely acclaimed and popular book by Betty Edwards entitled Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (New York, Perigee Books, 1989), a work that can teach you to draw even though you feel you have little talent and doubt that you could ever learn.

After picking up the brush on her own, Donatella studied oil painting with Dino Pasquero in Lugano and Aldo Parmigiani in Milano who gave her private lessons and courage and helped her appreciate the importance of classical training in her continuing education. To that end she credits especially Patricia Jerde and the former Minnesota River School of Fine Art in Burnsville (Minneapolis), Minnesota, for portrait painting and still lifes. Joseph Paquet’s studio classes in Saint Paul, Minnesota, enriched her landscape painting.

Of her art Donatella says, I am interested especially in the soul of things, a mystery embedded in the challenging shapes, rhythms, and colors of nature. I am drawn to the subtle varieties within creation that express individuality and that give relational meaning to the whole. Shapes and composition, light and shadow, edges and textures, values and color all are the artist’s tools of reverent communication. What’s before us is but a moment of ever-changing creation that, at best, we can presume to capture. I am inspired to interpret on canvas the ordinary beauty that surrounds us and makes living more pleasant and richer.