Stephanie

Stephanie paints the way she gardens — patiently, in layers, waiting for the thing to tell her what it wants to become. Trained as a horticultural engineer, she spent years learning the exact science of light, soil and water, and then spent the years after that unlearning enough of it to make art.

Her canvases begin with weather: rain on cobblestone, late sun on a café awning, the blue hour of a street that is emptying out. She works wet, fast and warm, then slows down for weeks over a single reflection until it holds. What she is really after is not the street — it is the feeling of standing in it.

The plants came from the same instinct. Every specimen in the gallery is grown out by her hand, on site, for at least six months before it is offered — root systems checked, leaves turned toward the light she chose for them. She reads a sansevieria the way she reads a palette: form, edge, value, restraint.

Her signature is the pairing. Stephanie will not sell you a painting without standing in front of it with a plant in her arms, testing the green against the greys, the arching leaf against the straight line of a frame. She calls it “finishing the composition off the wall.” Collectors call it the reason the piece never looks like it was hung — it looks like it grew there.

She has an almost stubborn faith that beauty does not require budget. A cracked pot, a cutting someone threw out, a single square of gold leaf: she can make art out of nothing, and does, weekly. Nothing in her studio is wasted, and nothing leaves it before it is right.

She works in White Rock, British Columbia, where the light comes off the water twice — once from the sky and once from the sand. It is, she says, the only studio lighting she has ever trusted.