Seeking the Meaning Behind the Pastoral Landscape

By Maggie Price

Allan Stephenson, a native of England living in the United States since 1971, studied at the Museum Art School in Portland, Oregon, and the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and is in many private and corporate collections. He is represented by several galleries in Oregon, and in San Francisco and Idaho; and on the web at www.allanstephenson.com

Pastel is the best medium there is, according to artist Allan Stephenson. “I also work in
oils and acrylics,” he says, “but I find with those I’m always battling things that would be so easy in pastel. With pastel, you can avoid what I like to call the tyranny of the brush—that’s when the brush does what it wants to do instead of what I want it to do.

“A paintbrush normally makes a hard edge, and you have to consciously adjust to get rid of that hard edge. I don’t see the world as having hard edges, and when I first saw pastel landscapes with a wonderfully diffused effect, I saw the possibilities of working more softly,” he says.
That first glimpse of what he might be able to do with pastels was a number of years ago. At that time, he was working in printmaking and producing etchings, and earning a living from that, “which isn’t easy to do,” he adds.








Allan says he’s always been an artist. “I guess it runs in the family,” he says. “My brother is an artist, my mother was a late-blooming painter, my daughter’s an art history major.” Born in England, Allan came to the United States in 1971, living briefly in California before moving to Oregon in 1973. Despite his years away from England, he still speaks with a charming touch of a British accent.

“When I first came to Oregon, I lived on the coast,” he recalls, “and basically read books, cut wood and watched it rain. Eventually, I moved to Portland. His home in Portland, which he shares with his wife Catherine, is an old Craftsman-era house built on a hillside. Flowers spill over the sidewalk in the front; colors and textures cover the walls and even the floors. Catherine has undoubtedly influenced the fabric portion of the decor—she’s a clothing designer with her own workspace on the second floor. Allan’s artwork is scattered throughout the house, but not overly abundant. “It’s hard to keep them around,” he says of his paintings. “They get finished and go out the door to the gallery. Sometimes I’d like to keep them a little longer.” His studio is the former attic, with steeply slanted sides and skylight windows. Though small, it’s brightly lit and functionally designed.

Allan began his art career in commercial art, in an unusual field. “When I was still in England,” he says, “I worked as an illustrator for science fiction books and magazines. It turned out to be good experience. The publications were in black and white, and I had to figure out how to communicate an image using only black, white and lines. I worked to convey color and texture with only these elements. I believe that’s a strong underpinning of good design in composing any picture.”

Later, in the United States, he worked in graphic design (pre-computer days, he notes with a grin), but eventually he got tired of commercial art. He began working in printmaking and silk-screening, and in the ’80s began working with etchings.

“I was fascinated with some of the more classical approaches in English landscape etchings,” he recalls. “They could convey color, depth and texture using one plate and one color. After working with that for a while, I began adding highlights in watercolor. And that led me into realistic landscapes in full color.” And that, of course, led him to working in pastels.

“I produced a few pastels in the beginning, not sure how they would be received, but I got them into a gallery, and they sold and the gallery wanted more, so I kept on,” he recalls.
“The thing about pastels is, if you look at any square inch of a pastel painting, you can find hundreds of colors—little specks of color are visible. That’s more like the reality of color, in my opinion—when you look at the landscape, a tree is not just one color, the sky is not just one color. But if you work in oils, you mix a blue and slap it on and that’s the sky, one flat color.


“I work to incorporate this concept of multiple colors in my pastels—I drag a glaze of color over an area, use layers of color, composites of many colors. Pastel works for me, for what I’m trying to convey in a landscape.”

Allan likes to work big. He likes to begin with a gestural drawing, using the extra-large sticks of Sennelier pastels. “Until those big sticks came out, it was hard to do a gestural drawing using pastels,” he adds.
He likes a colored surface, and usually uses LaCarte paper. “But it limits me,” he says, “ to a full sheet size, and I wish it came in bigger sizes. Other surfaces are more problematic. You can use a big piece of watercolor paper, but you have to stretch it, and I hate working on white, so I’d have to tone it. Using a brown or green ground, I can structure the values more quickly, working in the darkest ranges, then the lightest; initially, the ground provides the middle value. The beauty of La Carte is you can keep working it. Museum board gets shiny, the surface comes through, and it hasn’t got enough texture; you have to get it right the first time. I do use the Wallis paper that comes in rolls for large pastels. And if I need a painting bigger than that, I don’t do it in pastel.”

There are other problems with big pastel paintings, he notes, such as the weight of the glass. “If you use plexiglass on a big painting, it will bow,” he adds, pointing out a painting in his home where that has happened. And then there’s the cost of the frame and glass on a big painting.

“Galleries don’t want to take that into account,” he says. “It’s hard enough getting them to understand what pastels are and why they are just as valuable as oil paintings. But then, and this is something that bothers me, you can’t get them to just add on the cost of the frame and the glass. If the painting is worth, say a thousand dollars, and you put five hundred into the frame and glass, they want to sell the painting at three thousand, and that’s maybe more than a buyer will pay. It would make more sense to me for the artist to get a thousand, the gallery owner a thousand, and then the artist should get reimbursed for the frame and glass on top of that, thus reducing the end price and making it more affordable.”

In spite of all that, he still loves to work on a large scale, and continues to experiment with using fixative on the painting and then adding highlights, and spacing the Plexiglass away from the paper to help prevent static.

The color of the paper he’s working on is very important, he notes. “For instance, I have this painting done on a mauve-colored surface,” he says, pulling out a slide of a painting. “I did the same subject again on a brown surface, and it was totally different.”

He often uses a complementary color for the first layer. “I like to underpaint a blue sky with pink,” he says. “But then sometimes—like this painting,” indicating a painting on the wall, “the pink worked so well, I left it and never painted over it.”

Allan says he’s never found a set formula for producing a great painting. “You can do all those things you think should work,” he says, “all those compositional things, and put the dark in front, and get a good balance of light, etc. You can do all that, but then what you have to add is that emotional quality, that feeling, and that last bit can take a lot of time.

“There’a a mystical quality to landscapes,” he muses. “Anyway, that’s what I’m looking for. You know, you can go to shows and hear people say of a painting, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that done before.’ Well, that’s what I want to get past. I want to see that quality that’s really there, that quality that attracts you to a landscape scene.”
“You know when you’re out driving, and you stop on the road and say ‘There!’ What is that, that makes you stop there, and why was it there and not somewhere else? That’s what I want to portray in my landscapes.”
He takes photos of those places, dozens of photos and slides. Later, when he’s ready to paint in the studio, he looks at them and they bring back the memory of that feeling. “You have to satiate yourself with the image at the time,” he says “That’s the ineffable bit you have to internalize. Later, looking at the photos, you can bring that feeling back.”

He paces around the studio a little as he explores this thought. “That mystical quality is a metaphor for something, but I don’t know how to say what that is in words. You find it in some landscape paintings. Trees are metaphors, also, perhaps because they are as individual as humans are. The shape of a tree reflects its history, its condition. Trees are endlessly fascinating, like the landscape.”

He believes you can find that metaphor in the landscapes of
some of the great masters. “Constable, Innes, Caspar Friedrich, they have influenced me greatly,” he says. “English art at the
turn of the century—William Morris—that pseudo-mystical
element present in art and literature, Wind in the Willows and Howard’s End…there’s a melancholia there, a feeling of wanting to go back to the landscape of your childhood, but that landscape wasn’t really there in our childhoods, it’s been steadily vanishing since the Industrial Revolution.

“Those are the landscapes I want to paint,” he continues. “Pastoral scenes that give you a quiet, peaceful feeling. Looking at them, you could almost say, ‘oh, there’s nothing there.’ But just try to find such a place. It’s in my memory, from my childhood in England. I love the colors of the English landscape. I’m attracted to places where the life comes together, a valley with water, river winding through hills. There are places here in the Willamette Valley that have that same pastoral quality. And I love some of the Oregon hills…they appear to be bare hills, colorless, but really there are layers of color.”

Allan says he finds the great majority of buyers want art they can understand and relate to, and that’s why traditional landscape subjects are popular now. “But the odd thing is, so many galleries only want to sell those dark depressing ‘expressions’ of paintings,” he says. “I don’t think people should have to have pictures explained to them. I don’t want to have to say, ‘read this book and then you’ll understand the painting.’ I want landscapes that relate to the natural world we live in. It’s never trite, never a cliché, it’s reality. I aim for a classic, well-crafted image. I learned to draw, I learned the use of color, and I think those things are more important than ‘expressing’ my angst.”

In spite of his desire to represent the natural reality, he adds that “a picture is still a picture, we can’t recreate reality. Art is a visual thing. You can’t explain what you’re saying in a picture in words, though the viewer may relate to the feeling, the metaphor in the painting.

“An old friend of mine once said ‘Seek truth and get beauty, but seek beauty and you will just get pretty’,” Allan concludes. “In my paintings, I want to go beyond pretty, I want to seek and express the truth, and find the beauty of the landscape.”

Maggie Price is a pastel artist and writer, and editor of The Pastel Journal.