Ron Donoughe (b. 1958) is one of those American artists intimately linked with the region where he lives. When we hear the name Winslow Homer, we picture coastal Maine, or perhaps the Bahamas; for Andrew Wyeth, it’s the Brandywine Valley and Cushing, Maine; for Edward Hopper, New York City and Cape Cod. These artists were not uninterested in the rest of the world, it’s just that there was so much to record in their own corners of it.
For Ron Donoughe, that enchanted terrain is western Pennsylvania, which encompasses not only Pittsburgh (metropolitan population, 2.3 million), but also the Allegheny Mountains that form part of the Appalachians, as well as rolling hills and valleys dotted with towns, farms, industrial complexes, and mines. Donoughe knows this area so well that he…