Art in the Right Place: Galleries sell slices of Alaska.

• Author: Rhode, Scott

A week before her first showing at Stephan Fine Arts, the painter was, in her words, "freakin' out," She had been painting for only three years since a midlife crisis prompted her to convert her oversized master bedroom into a studio. Her work, she says, is "very emotional," arrangements of high-contrast colors, sometimes with expressive drips, A departure from the birds, fish, and mountains portrayed on most of the gallery's walls.

The artist need not have worried. When the First Friday in May arrived, she was among friends. After all, the gallery is hers.

Becky Stephan grew up in the art business. Her father, Pat, a realtor by trade, opened the gallery inside the Hotel Captain Cook in downtown Anchorage in 1977 and pulled her into meetings when she was as young as eight. She's run the family business for the last seventeen of its forty-five years, building her reputation as an owner, not an artist.

Kara Kirkpatrick has known Stephan in both roles. "When I talk to Becky Stephan, I'm in awe. 'You're Becky Stephan of Stephan Fine Arts!' She's definitely a very prominent person in my world of looking up to," Kirkpatrick says. Kirkpatrick co-owns Dos Manos, a gallery in midtown Anchorage where Stephan's paintings went on sale first.

"I wanted to make sure I got into another gallery before I ever put it in my own," Stephan says. "I also wanted to make sure I did the typical route, which was going to restaurants, hanging in restaurants, hanging in cafes, and doing all that before I went into, like, a fine art gallery. Which would be myself."

As an owner, Stephan had to make sure that her paintings fit alongside the fifty established artists in stock.

Stephan Fine Arts is one of the few true galleries in Alaska, as Susan Peters sees it. Peters owns Scanlon Gallery and Custom Framing in Ketchikan, which marks its 50th anniversary this fall as perhaps the oldest art retailer operating in Alaska. Too many galleries "don't specifically just do handcrafted art," she says. "That's what a gallery usually has versus mass productions." Stephan qualifies, in her view, as does 2 Friends Art Gallery in Midtown.

However, as Kirkpatrick points out, "Everybody does it different, and everybody has their own twist on it."

From the Heart

Making art is not a prerequisite for selling art. For instance, Peters is not an artist herself, but she does enjoy oil paintings of landscapes.

Katie Sevigny paints landscapes, animals, and portraits--and she sells them in her gallery, Sevigny Studio, in downtown Anchorage.

"There was this one moment for me where I was really trying to get into a gallery that I thought was the top of the top, and I knew that I was selling well," Sevigny recalls. "I walked out of that meeting and walked down the street and saw a 'for lease' sign, and I was...