Artist takes a lead from Edgar Degas
Mary-Jane Steffens is in love with Edgar Degas. Sadly, he's been dead more than 100 years.
Degas was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings, and Steffens has kicked off the restraints of a regular job to follow in his footsteps.
The Nelson web designer is taking a financial risk by devoting most of her time to art, but feels that she’ll always regret it if she doesn’t try.
Steffens is this month’s featured artist at Wall to Wall Art Gallery in Bridge St and will hold a function to celebrate membership of the collective at 5.30pm on Valentine’s Day, Wednesday.
Born and raised in Canterbury, Steffens showed artistic promise from an early age. When she was four or five she drew a mural on the wall in crayon. Her mother says she always regretted painting over it.
Soon she was winning prizes at school, later taking up photography and becoming a graphic designer at a community newspaper, taking over as production manager by the time she was 22.
Not afraid to branch out, she helped start a magazine called Essence, focusing on the Canterbury region.
Drawn from an early age to Impressionism, she turned heads when she exhibited early nudes in pastel at Windsor Gallery in Christchurch.
By 2008 she’d moved to Nelson, doing design work for Hothouse Creative for five years. The ‘n’ in the Nelson City Council logo is an instantly recognisable example of her work there.
After leaving Hothouse, she worked as a graphic designer and web designer.
A breakthrough came in 2016, when she spent a month at Studio Escalier in Paris, studying portraiture in the style of the old masters in oil.
“It was huge - I learned so much,” she said.
“That course changed the way I looked at portraiture and the human figure, learning that a portrait is really just a series of corrections. I learned to not be afraid to constantly review and change.”
Steffens turned 45 in December. “After 25 years of work I decided to take the leap and focus on art, so I joined Wall to Wall and all hell broke loose.”
Now she says she’s in a transition stage, working as hard as she can to build a body of work, while still doing occasional web design to pay the bills.
“I’m not trying for any shock factor in my work, I just want to demonstrate that the human form can be appreciated without any grand message.”
Steffens hosts her opening function at Wall to Wall Gallery at 5.30pm, Wednesday.