About Artist

About the Artist Donna Fado Ivery is a clergywoman whose pastorate was interrupted by disabling injuries sustained in a freak restaurant accident. While brain injury made speaking and concentration toilsome, Donna began to express herself through painting. Donna's paintings became a journal revealing "Brushes of the Sprit", the character of Pain, and the persistence of Healing. Through her painting, speaking, and writing, Donna seeks to reveal and support the healing process. After graduating with honors from UC Davis and Boston University School of Theology, Donna Fado Ivery was ordained elder in the California-Nevada Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, pastoring churches for eight years before a 1994 freak restaurant accident. When a more than 200 lb. glass partition loosed from its ceiling moorings, fell, slamming her head twice, the glass didn't break, but Donna's way of seeing, hearing, and understanding were shattered by head injury. With compromised speech, left-side, balance, perception, concentration, memory, and vision, Donna's counselor suggested she try painting to express the complicated facets of her pain. The paintings summarized the most urgent agenda of Donna's heart, and were in fact, painted prayers. Whenever a painting touched absolute honesty of her experience, Donna discovered a give and take conversation with the Holy Spirit, the most Creative Spirit, and would find an answer to the prayer petition revealed in the painted image. While brain injury causes standing, speaking, reading, or word-finding to be exhausting activities, Donna experiences painting as an energizing exercise of a very deep, sacred space. While managing disabilities is a full time endeavor, Donna moonlights by dedicating herself to a ministry about the Art of Healing. She has a home-based business, Spirit Brush Arts, and a website, www. Adventures In Healing. com. She has led workshops nationally on Silk Painting and Healing Pain through Art and Spirituality. She sells paintings (developed in series and by commission), Dancing With Pain notecards, and the Scarf of Tears™, a Gift for the Healing Process of Grief(a handpainted silk scarf and accompanying meditation for the bereaved). She interprets her Table of Tears, a 6 foot diameter stained glass and acrylic table composed of seven teardrops and a Holy Spirit centerpiece for a church body in pain, demonstrating a history of exclusion and Holy Spirit-led journey of healing. All of her work shares the faith-based gift of how to live well when pain doesn't leave. Through her paintings, writings, and teaching, Donna reveals and supports the healing of others. Selected Writing Editor and regular contributor, Voices and Silences. Quarterly professional association newsletter. 1996-present. "Dancing with Pain." Poem published in Seeing In The Dark: A Vision of Creativity and Spirituality by Beverly J. Shamana.. Nashville: Abingdon Press. 2001. pp. 117-119. "The Sabbath Question." WellSprings Journal. Fall 2001. pp. 55-58. Nashville. "Finding Wholeness Through Image, Spirit and Truth. Painting as a Practice of Self Care." Center For Women and Religion. April 1999. "Scarf of Tears: Offering Comfort and Care for the Healing Process of Grief." Self-published: San Francisco. 1997.