Donna Hunt is known to the community as the previous owner of The Soda Fountain in Forest. Hunt sold The Fountain in 2013 and currently teaches art, art appreciation, and English at East Rankin Academy in Pelahatchie.
Hunt lives with a second passion that predates her love of teaching. She is a pastel artist who works with soft pastels. She paints people, rural landscapes, and urban landscapes.
Hunt’s paintings include rural landscapes and buildings in Mississippi and Louisiana; beachscapes in Florida, architecture in Venice, Italy; the Greek, island town of Monemvasia.
Hunt said, “I like to paint places that mean something to me.”
Describing the meaning of soft pastels, Hunt said, “The best pastels are like painting with butter. Pastels are tactile — you feel connected to the canvas.”
Hunt’s pastel work is a little bit impasto, having texture, and it is a little bit opaque, allowing layers of pastels and the colored canvas to show through.
“With pastels, there is no binding,” Hunt said, “you’re painting with raw pigment. You see through one color to another.”
Hunt said that people hear pastels and they think of pastel colors, but the term pastels refers to the medium and texture rather than the tones of the pigments. One might paint in pastels with pinks and tangerines, or one may paint in deep colors.
Hunt’s landscapes feature earthy tones — cappuccino, mocha, olive, rust, burgundy, and shadows with plum and navy.
With oil painting and pastels, one experiences a piece at two levels. At a distance, one sees the forms, the colors, and shadows. Up close, one sees the marks — the forms disappear and one sees the energy of the making of the painting. Up close, you see the expression of the artist and footsteps of their performance.
“I started landscapes to challenge myself and learn form — to see the whole,” Hunt said, “landscapes helped me break down the colors.”
What Hunt refers to in breaking the colors down is how color in pastel is not put down in flat swaths. There are little flecks of red in the evergreens and a glisten of yellow in a blue beard. Color is affected by the colors around it. The burgundy shade makes the spring green of a tree’s foliage jump to the foreground.
Color in painting is fractured. The forms are built up out of the static of smaller marks. Trees are not drawn — they are rendered as splotches of pigment and shape.
Hunt said that she grew up with art. Hunt said, “My mother painted with oils.” Hunt described her mother holding pseudo workshops with the children from the neighborhood and would hang up their paintings on the clothes line at the end for praise.
Hunt said her mother would always have her doing art. When outdoors on trips or camping, Hunt said, “My mom would have us carving faces on clay rocks.”
Hunt described her first encounter with pastels as finding the love of her life. Hunt said her first encounter with pastels was a class in Jackson at a Baptist church in 1992. Hunt said, “When I found pastels — I found what I love.”
Hunt was born in Carthage. She attended Mississippi State University and graduated in 1981 with a Masters in Education.
Donna married Ricky Hunt in 1981 and began teaching in Kosciusko. She taught in Kosciusko for five years before the Hunts bought a drug store in Forest and moved to the town in 1986. They have two daughters, Lauren and Leslie, and they have one son, Geoffrey.
The Hunts sold the drug store in 2009 and then The Soda Fountain in 2013.
Donna Hunt said, “One of the biggest things I miss about the store is the people.”
Donna and Ricky Hunt visited Georgia O’Keefe’s home on Ghost Ranch in June. O’Keefe is famous for her sensuous, figural paintings of flowers.
The Hunts were required to ride on horseback to travel to the isolated, desert house in New Mexico.
Hunt described the landscape on Ghost Ranch, “The scenery is like wearing rose colored glasses because of the pinks in the clay in the hills.”
Hunt currently teaches 10th grade English, art appreciation to 9th graders, and art in grades 9-12. Hunt said what she loves most about teaching is opening up students that are closed. Hunt said, “Students might be afraid to paint at first. I like to help students discover that they have the ability.”
