Though artist Lisa Steffens’ works include paintings on canvas and paper, it is her monotypes that best express the artist’s stated desire to let emotion and imagination give a spiritual dimension to her work.
Steffens, who is new to Vero, is wrapping up a show Saturday at Raw Space at Edgewood, a recently opened gallery on Old Dixie downtown.
Of the works in the show, many of the 19 monotypes are standouts. A spontaneous form of printmaking, monotypes are made by painting a picture in ink onto a metal plate. The imagery is transferred onto paper with a quick run through a printing press, or more slowly by rubbing the back of the paper as it lies on the plate – Steffens uses a wooden spoon. Because the picture is not etched into the plate, at most only two prints can be pulled from it: a dense initial image and a much lighter “ghost” image.
The technique has been around since the days of Rembrandt. In the latter part of the 19th century Edgar Degas most famously took “printed drawings,” as he called them, to inventive heights.
Steffens counts that master’s work as an inspiration for her own. This past summer on a trip to New York she visited the Met exhibition “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty.” It focused on the subjects of Degas’ monotypes, including ballet dancers, intimate views of women at home and the bath, and the sex workers and patrons of Parisian brothels.
Steffens’ monotypes largely draw their figural subject matter from old family photos and the artist’s imagination.
In her best compositions, the way Steffens divides space adds psychological tension between the people depicted in them. Those pictures are strongly reminiscent of Degas, who also liked to keep both his subjects and his viewers a bit off-balance. Borrowing from the eccentric framing of the amateur photograph, Degas made his subjects look somehow more alive than much of the carefully posed and limned art of his day.
The same can be said of Steffens’ monotypes. Her solid drawing skills combined with her tendency to place her figures just so in proximity to one another presents not only a picture, but also a personal relationship.
“The pictures are imbued by memory as well,” Steffens says. Many of the prints are richly textured, tonal applications of black ink on white paper.
The pictures are not only about the relationships between the people in them, but also between the artist and her subjects.
Asked if an intriguing print of a woman with children called “Bedtime” depicts Steffens’ mother and her siblings, Steffens says yes. “But I really don’t want to talk about it,” she quickly adds. “It’s very personal.”
As she wrote in her statement for the show, Steffens’ work is “ultimately about a personal journey and a reinvention of self.” It examines “the world I left behind and the one I am in the process of creating.”
Those worlds include Westchester County, where she was born and raised, and England, where she lived for 23 of her 61 years.
Steffens’ art training was taken both here and abroad. After attending Parsons School of Design in New York for a year, she moved to England. There she studied graphic design for four years at Southampton College of Higher Education (now part of Southampton Solent University). After landing a job as a graphic designer for the BBC, Steffens completed a master’s degree in communication at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London.
That was in 2001. When she moved back to the states in 2004, Steffens studied for three years at New York Studio School, where she earned a master of fine arts.
For Steffens, an avowed Anglophile, life in England is about the centuries-old architecture that makes history a thing of the present for resident and visitor alike.
“That would really be at the forefront of whatever you were doing.”
Winchester Cathedral is Steffens’ favorite place; she has to go whenever she’s in England “to give a nod to Jane Austen,” who lies beneath a stone in the nave’s floor.
“I think that painting or sketching in the courtyard garden outside Winchester Cathedral is wonderful,” Steffens says. “Is it different than painting on the street in the cooler weather here in Florida? In some senses, yes, in others, no. You’re still seeing all the beautiful connections between things.”
It was, in fact, connections that brought Steffens to the Treasure Coast.
Steffens’ latest act of reinvention comes with her move – not quite a year ago – to Vero Beach from Fort Pierce, where she still teaches at Westwood High School and Indian River State College.
“I’ve been coming down to Fort Pierce since I was 3 because my grandparents lived there,” she says.
Her late mother and her aunts eventually retired to Fort Pierce as well.
It was to be near her mother’s remaining sister and some cousins that Steffens left Westchester County, N.Y., and moved to Florida in 2014.
Steffens wasted no time in establishing relationships with area artists. Two of the paintings in the current exhibition were done outside at the Vero Beach home of artist René Guerin, including the oil on paper “By the Pool” of 2015. It shows a young beauty in a black bikini seated on the edge of a lap pool with a green reflective surface.
The fluidity with which Steffens applied paint to the prepared sheet might put you in mind of a watercolor. It certainly shows off Steffens’ spontaneous drawing technique with the added benefit of an assured color palette.
A painting on paper of Adams Ranch came about through Steffens’ acquaintance with Miami-area artist Michael Enns, who grew up in Fort Pierce and brought Steffens to the ranch.
Steffens left the painting in an unfinished state, with large areas of white paper defining negative spaces between the tree branches in the upper part of the picture. It is one on the most graphically striking works on display.
Steffens’ show at Raw Space began only last Friday after being delayed a week by Hurricane Matthew; it wraps up Saturday afternoon. But the artist has made the most of her time there. During the run, she has been working on a large drawing in a back room.
“I can’t work large in my little flat, and I like to go out and paint,” she explains. “I work wherever I am.”
As soon as the weather is a little cooler, Steffens anticipates painting en plein air with a new artist friend or two.
“Art can be very lonely work. There is an aspect of the isolation that is wonderful at times, and the aspect of communing with nature when you are outdoors is really important,” she says. “But it’s kind of nice to stop and have a little chat about what you are looking at, how you are feeling.”
The artist will be present at Raw Space Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.