Donalee Peden-Wesley teaches at Onondaga Community College (color and concept, art history and painting) and Syracuse University (drawing). Although she teaches varied subjects, Peden-Wesley's first love remains drawing, and she considers drawing the subject she teaches best.

"I love the spontaneity of drawing," she says. "I've always loved mark making. With painting, a lot of the mark making disappears. So I've always been searching for a way to keep that mark, and to keep it as vibrant and alive as that first gesture that you put down on the paper."

Peden-Wesley is a Syracuse native who graduated from the former Central Tech High School. She attended the Massachusetts College of Art, then returned to Syracuse to complete Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees at Syracuse University. After earning her Master's, in 1990, she moved to Madison, WI, to teach drawing at the University of Wisconsin. In 1999, she returned to Central New York to head the drawing department at SUNY Oswego. After another spell living elsewhere - in Poughkeepsie - she returned to Syracuse in 2002, to be close to her parents, and began teaching at SU and OCC.

Peden-Wesley creates figurative images, using charcoal, watercolor, and a strong sense of narrative. She has shown work in England, Germany and Australia, and throughout the United States. The Everson Museum in Syracuse, the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, and the Drawing Institute in San Francisco have Peden-Wesley's work in their collections.

When teaching drawing, Peden-Wesley emphasizes three dimensional space, purposeful mark making, and whole image making, as opposed to object making. Students often find these tasks difficult, she says. "Some of them have been taught to do contour drawings, so all they see is edges. They don't know how to flesh out surfaces. And a lot of the time, the marks they make are just random scratching. It doesn't have purpose. I try to get them to think about that mark, and have them make a mark that means something."