Being trained at the Slade School from 1958 to 1962, Donaldson was not part of the Royal College of Art students, although his early friendship with Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips linked him directly to the group of RCA students who established Pop Art as a movement at the 1961 Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London. In 1962 Donaldson developed the simplified treatment of the female figure that typified his work over the next decade. Youthful, shapely and sexually confident, these women strike flirtatious poses whilst revealing themselves to the viewer's gaze. Their facial features are barely sketched in or depicted in a generalized way, to emphasise the fact that these are not portraits of particular individuals but fantasy images formed in the mind of a young man.Like Hockney, Donaldson dreamt of a sun-drenched, laid-back southern California life and settled in Los Angeles 1966-1968. The bold simplicity of his compositional schemes and the central role accorded to flat areas of saturated colour were confirmed by his American experience. Donaldson's work has been included in all international, overview exhibitions on Pop Art and in all publications on the movement.