Drawing was Porfirio DiDonna’s favorite activity. Taken together, his drawings and sketches, are a visual journal of his creative life where every drawing and sketch, even those most questionable, was kept. He admitted that he was never sure whether a doodle or scratch might prove to be important to him in the future – so he kept everything.

This Porfirio DiDonna Fifteen Drawings (1967 – 1985) exhibition hopefully conveys the quiet freedom he found in drawing and his self- imposed language of dots, dashes, and small arcs. It is necessarily a severe abbreviation of the range of experimentation he did.

The DiDonna drawing show I would like to see someday will take place in a series of large museum rooms hung floor to ceiling with an entire set of his drawings and sketches from a given year or longer. Then we could fully appreciate the “twists and turns of his thinking,” as the artist David True observed about DiDonna’s drawings. It will offer us a great opportunity to understand the perseverance his ambition demanded.

All works in this exhibition are for sale. Inquiries may be made by email (contact@nielsengallery.com) or by telephone 978.369.7071.

Publications on Porfirio DiDonna

Porfirio DiDonna The Shape of Knowing

Published 2013
164 Pages
John Baker
Forward by Deborah J. Hayes
Betsy Anderson
Publisher: Pressed Wafer (Brooklyn NY)
ISBN 978-1940396019