Jeanne Steffan at Sidestreet Arts Gallery

For the first exhibition of 2024, Sidestreet Arts Gallery features a power duo: Jeanne Steffan and her husband Tom Skelly. After they moved from sunny southern California, they immediately fell in love with the natural beauty in Oregon.

“California has beaches too. But here, the beaches are just wow,” said Jeanne, in front of her painting of Thor’s Well, a popular destination in quant town Yachats.

From afar, the crashing waves splash over the canvas, with gossamer lightness, against jewel-colored rocks. Upon closer examination, the rugged rock formation is made of thick impasto. I immediately gravitated toward the sculptural quality of the cliff. Its onerous physicality almost begs you to touch it.

They remind me of Ernest Lawson, whose landscape paintings with a “crushed jewel” technique are always so much better to see in person. Like Lawson, Steffan builds up pigment to suggest the undulating shadows of rock formation, which catch the light at many angles. The density is not only in mass but in richness of colors. As one moves around, the impression shifts, just like the true experience one would have on the Oregon coast.

Here, Steffan presents the nature as a puzzle. The incongruity between weightless mist and weighty rock is deceptive of the true power dynamics – It is the crashing waves that dug a hole to form the “well.”

When I spotted some cross-hatching patterns in the rocky part, I asked if the work was a collage. “You know I just hate to waste any paint.” Steffan took me to see closely those thick paint layers. “So after the acrylic paint dried, I just scraped it off.” Her hand followed the clump like touching a feather. She then glues them on the canvas, having a general idea of where they should go. Those colors may be awful, however, so she harmonizes them with additional layers of paint.

The cross-hatching texture comes from the color-mixing surface on which dried paint is peeled off. Sometimes, she cuts the paint strips, using them to suggest a rock shape here or there. Or sometimes they’re applied without modification. She referred to a section of a cliff. Its light grayness seems to disintegrate within the atmospheric mist around it.

The transplant couple have been living in Portland for six years, trading a Southern California ranch home for a Tudor Portland abode. Suddenly, she said everything felt squeezed in. “It took us a while to get used to it, but we love it here.” That love translates into many paintings easily recognizable with the iconic motifs, be it the tidal pools in Devil’s Churn (not far from Thor’s Well), the pumpkin patches in Sauvie Island, or the majestic bridge over Astoria.