Artist’s Biography

    

 

Dorene Steggell’s art reflects the places that she has lived – a farm at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, the arid West’s red rock, plateaus, canyons and lush mountains, the south of Spain, the maritime Northwest, and the richly agricultural Willamette Valley.  In her teens he studied art in New Mexico and Utah.  As a textile artist, she taught and sold her work before returning to college to study environmental design and earn a graduate degree in architecture.  While working in architecture and related fields, her art and design skills continued to grow.  She now works full-time as an artist and printmaker from her studio in Eugene.

 

The majority of Dorene’s subjects are landscapes. Her paintings and prints are often inspired by a particular place, filtered through memory and experience. Growing up on a farm at the base of the Wasatch Mountains gave her a deep affinity for dramatic topography.  She is inspired by the painters of the sublime, yet her work has a modernist edge to it.  It evokes space and place and the allure of distance.

 

Dorene currently works primarily in oil painting and monotype. She finds that the two media feed and balance each other. A monotype is a single impression (i.e. print) that is not repeatable.  The monotype image is developed on a flat plate and transferred to another surface -- usually paper. She creates her monotypes with black ink and their strong value structures are echoed in her paintings.  In her mixed-media monotypes, color is added directly to the printed monotype image, similar to hand tinting a black and white photograph, giving them a luminescent quality related to the transparent glazing techniques found in her paintings.  Monotype provides a vehicle for spontaneous exploration and painting provides the opportunity for deeper development and evolution of a work. 

 

She has recently begun presenting her work publicly, and it has been very well received.  She has been in several juried shows.  In February 2010 she received an award for her painting “riparian” in Yosemite Renaissance XXV, a juried show at the Yosemite Museum Gallery in Yosemite National Park.  She has served as a juror on several Oregon State 1% for Art selection juries.  Her work is currently showing at River Gallery in Independence, Oregon and at Gallery 360 in Vancouver, Washington.    Some of her work can be seen on the Gallery 360 website (www.gallery360.org) and on this website.