“I’m ultimately the complete humanist,” Lynn Donoghue once said. Throughout her career, she championed figural and portrait work, at a time when few were practicing the genre. Donoghue largely chose her own subjects, mostly friends, resulting in a body of work representative of the cultural community in Toronto and beyond. “Marjan Mozetich with a Baroque Flourish” is one of three portraits that she painted of the Canadian composer. As Earl Miller wrote about a 1987 exhibition of Donoghue’s work at Gallery One, Toronto, in which this portrait likely appeared: the artist’s “ability to expressionistically render the subtleties of personality traits remains her forte”–so true with Mozetich’s intensely blue eyes that fix our gaze.

Donoghue is known for her unapologetically large-scale work, in which gestural swathes of saturated colour are applied directly onto the canvas in abstract expressionist manner, the figure reverberating with an expansive background much like colour-field painting. She received training at H. B. Beal Secondary School, London, Ontario, where Paterson Ewen was one of her teachers, himself having switched from abstraction to image painting at the time. After her first trip to Europe in 1979, she became more affected by the legacy of past painting masters, quoted their work in hers; yet, as Ihor Holubizky points out in the 2004 “Lynn Donoghue: The Last Supper” catalogue, “she never attempted to paint in their ‘manner,’ or concoct mannerisms. She made something of the multiplicity of signals, historical and contemporary, for herself as a self-directed practice.” The baroque flourish, like a sumptuous sky ceiling mural, seems to emerge from Mozetich’s head, emblematic of the sitter’s creative energy as one who himself blends traditional, popular and modern in his own musical practice.