Artist and art therapist Donna Alena Hrabčáková has dedicated her life to the healing capacities of art. She has lived and worked in Ohio, California, Slovakia, and the Red Lake Nation Reservation in Northern Minnesota. Her exquisitely colorful paintings are dreamlike, vivid, and profoundly moving, often evoking joy, sorrow and hope within a single canvas. Her work has been exhibited in many places throughout the US and Eastern Europe. She had recently relocated from the US to her ancestral village of Gigloce, Slovakia, 27 miles from the Ukrainian border, when the pandemic struck. She weathered much of it there, creating extraordinary new work both on canvas and on the walls of her great-grandfather’s home. She then returned to the U.S. to manage her visa when the war in Ukraine broke out. This led her to create a series of paintings titled Guardians of the Border, which have been widely shared all over the world. Here she talks with host Tanya Shaffer about her childhood, her dreams, her connection to her ancestors, and her belief in art’s transcendent power to heal.

Visit Donna Alena’s Facebook page, New Ancients, to see more of her work.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy my interviews with visual artists Marjorie Morgan, titled The Landscape of Dreams; and with Mia Risberg, titled The Viewer Makes the Narrative.

All paintings copyright Donna Alena Hrabcakova. Off-Leash Arts theme music by Asher Witkin.