Pastel Landscapes that Honor Nature
Surrounded by Montana’s wild country, Jeanette Rehahn’s pastel landscapes help viewers see nature in a different way.
By Maria Seda-Reeder
Jeanette Rehahn has been an artist her entire life. “I’ve always been like this; I think I must’ve popped out an artist,” she says with a chuckle over the phone from her home in Bigfork, Mont. Despite growing up during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Rehahn has always been interested in realism, and she has rarely wavered in her dedication to verisimilitude in her work.
As a child, Rehahn would draw the world around her on anything from notebooks to the church bulletin. When Rehahn heard about the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) while still in high school, developing her talents there seemed like a natural next step.
Rehahn was attending SAIC as a sculpture major during the early 1960s when one of her professors told her that women couldn’t be artists; they merely married them. Shocked and disillusioned, Rehahn says she felt as if “a lightbulb just went out.” She did go on to marry the man who was her biggest competitor in art school and snuck into his classes when he went to grad school. She was still yearning for any kind of outlet for her artistic compulsions.
Finding Her Way
Later, Rehahn jumped at the opportunity to create a series of molded, large-scale cubes for use by university professors in science lecture halls. That project led to illustration work for science professors at Purdue University. When Rehahn moved across the country to California, she continued working in that same vein of realism, creating illustrations for the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art and humanities.
“I got to where I was doing technical illustrations for a variety of regular clients,” Rehahn says. “And even though business was good, I had grown bored. I knew if I was going to keep going like this, I’d never get to express myself the way I wanted to,” she says. “I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew I needed to leave that space.”
Rehahn returned to sculpture and, with the guidance of friends, began doing hard-shell gourd work. She pursued this discipline for several years, approaching them more as ceremonial objects than as decorative pieces. With applications of dry metallic earth pigments to dried and hollowed-out gourds using light Japanese brushstrokes, Rehahn says her work was often compared to Raku pottery. Rehahn often added natural details like coils of date palm grasses and horsehair to each piece.
Big Country
It was a trip to a showing of her gourd work at a gallery in Bigfork that catalyzed Rehahn’s relocation to Montana. At the same time, she made the move to pastel in her quest to depict the beauty of her new home. “Within three days, I knew this was it,” Rehahn says of her first visit to the area. The jump from sculpture to painting and minimalism to realism completed a circle for the artist, with her long commitment to form and visual verity.
After hearing Rehahn talk about the locations she paints, it’s clear that she has found her muse. The artist photographs her landscapes — rather than working en plein air — as the locations themselves are quite wild. Her favorite spots are e in Flathead County, where the backwaters of the Rocky Mountains empty and the rivers meander. “It’s bear country,” Rehahn says. Therefore, well aware of her surroundings, she never stays in any one location too long.
When she took photographs for what would become Verdant Oasis, for example, the artist says, “The mosquitoes down there were so ferocious nobody would want to paint there for long.” She’ll often take photos from the vantage point of a little aluminum boat with a shallow draft. The boat, Rehahn says, allows her to “get right in there” for the photos, but she admits that she always goes with someone else to watch her back, just in case.
Exacting Process
“I use pastel pencils for some details, but only very rarely,” Rehahn says. “For example, in Swan Valley Lily Pond [above], I wanted really thin lines, so I got them out. But I ended up using Rembrandts, which are hard enough to make thin lines.”
Rehahn enjoys working out her composition ahead of time. If uncertain of the values, she’ll plan her painting out in advance, creating a fairly elaborate pencil sketch. Rehahn uses Sennelier, Unison, Ludwig and Diane Townsend Artists’ Pastels.
The painter typically begins with an underlayer using Nupastels, sometimes washed with Turpenoid because, as she says, she likes “the darks to be dark. I’m not as concerned with other areas as much as the darks. I like them to punch.” Being conscious of the colors — particularly the darks she employs as visual foils to her subsequent lighter strokes — allows her to build the feeling of depth into her composition.
The Viewer Experience
Rehahn may use a deep purple pastel in a composition instead of pure black to add warmth and interest. With the underlayer set, she adds soft pastels and smooths them in with Styrofoam packing peanuts to create the correct coloring overall. Then she works on texture, starting with the sky and moving back-to-front toward the foreground grasses. Of the visceral experience she hopes to provoke in the viewer, Rehahn says “I want the grasses themselves to become the details — I want someone to feel as though they’re right there.”
“I want to cause people to stop, to recognize that a field of grass is a wonderful living carpet,” Rehahn says. “If I can paint it in a ‘living’ way, they might stop and take notice.”
Fixing the Grasses
To hear Rehahn describe it, her moments in this environment sound almost like a spiritual communion. “Grasses talk to me,” she says. “There’s just something about them.” Many of Rehahn’s paintings feature these whispering grasses — what the artist refers to as the “living carpet of the earth” — in meticulously rendered thin lines and pops of colors.
Instead of using spray fixative, Rehahn gently presses her strokes into the paper with her finger, moving her finger up the individual blades of grass. She continues to soften the look in this way as she moves forward in the picture plane, creating a feeling of depth and form.
She also does the same thing for her second layer of color using Styrofoam packing peanuts. “With my finger, after putting on the first layer of grasses, will very lightly touch the color, moving up the line slowly,” she says. “I think the light touch is what it’s all about. It seems to have an effect I enjoy. It’s funny how you find out in the process of painting what works and what doesn’t.”
Seeing Details in a Different Way
It’s important that we recognize “the little things,” Rehahn says. “I could paint mountains like everybody else here does, but I like the closer views,” she admits. “I’m creating the opportunity for viewers to see nature in a different way than they may have before, especially grasses.”
One way or another, Rehahn’s content always seems to be about depicting the beauty of the world around her. Using her identifiable combination of soft, blurred background juxtaposed with sharp contrasting details in the trees and grasses, Rehahn’s compositions remind us of the fleeting nature of life — how precious time is, and how art can be a window into honoring that presence.
Meet the Artist
Jeanette Rehahn of Bigfork, Mont., has fostered a lifelong connection to nature and art. She enjoys capturing movement in nature, especially grasses blowing in the wind. The artist received an honorable mention in the 14th Annual Pastel 100 Competition, and is represented by Frame of Reference Gallery in Bigfork, Mont.
Maria Seda-Reeder is an arts writer, independent curator and adjunct professor of art at the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
A version of this article appeared in Pastel Journal.
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