Jan Roberts-Dominguez: Local Artist and Her Team (Final part 3)

Jan Roberts-Dominguez’s and her husband Steve’s home is their gallery. The gallery walls, beautifully lined with landscape paintings and hung by their custom frames, is home to the couple who welcomed me at the door as if we’d known each other for ages. Jan and Steve Dominguez are more than just husband and wife who share a love for art, they are teammates. 

Jan, who graduated with a master’s in Home Economics with a minor in Food Nutrition, isn’t just a watercolor painter. Among her many creative callings, she is also a renowned food stylist and freelance writer/food columnist, the creator of five cookbooks, and a photographer.

“I've always been an artist, even food was a creative outlet for me,” Jan said, smiling and fingering through her latest book, “Oregon Hazelnut Country: The Food, the Drink, the Spirit.” 

Jan's latest cookbook

Her husband Steve, by her side, says that “she can look at any recipe, and tell whether it’s going to work, so that’s a big leg up.” Jan’s creativity and knowledge of recipes and products allows her to work miraculous wonders throughout almost 300 pages of delectably paired hazelnut based dishes. 

Not only did Jan write and illustrate this book, she was behind all means of production and produced it in less than a year so that it could come out for the next harvest. This was her first book where she had total control, starting the August before a harvest and successfully releasing before the following september. Jan found the designer, photographer, and her husband Steve was her personal editor, capturing her words and “working so tirelessly to maintain style, tone, continuity within and around each recipe and thought, dealing with... long recipe titles, and making [her] look pretty smart,” says Jan in the beginning acknowledgements of her book.

“It was a unique experience that almost no author gets to do; to have total control, from beginning to end of a big project like this, it's almost unheard of,” says Steve.

Step by step, adapting and creating as she moves on from ingredient to ingredient, food isn’t the only thing Jan has mastered throughout her years. When she was younger and trying to break into the scene as a young food writer, she had to make herself indispensable. “If you're gonna break into the writing industry it helps if you can bring something extra besides just your words, in my case it was the art,” she said. 

Jan began illustrating all of her stories and columns and became the total package. Being that she is a self-taught artist, she always had a knack for painting or sketching. She had many influences to guide her on her creative path, one artist in particular by the name of Steven Quiller, a colorado artist who’s mainly known for his “Quiller Wheel,” a color wheel to aid color mixing. Quiller’s theory of color clicked for Jan, helping her understand how to work with pigments while she was learning and trying to understand color.

“I also learned because of him [and] in my own self teaching, not to really focus too much on what other people are telling you,” she said. “Figure it out for yourself because sometimes they’re wrong, and if you buy into it then it can really limit you. It’s better to just explore and maybe if people tell you you can’t, [then ask] ‘well why not?’”

An original piece by Jan

Jan paints a lot of landscape pieces, where she’ll use her photography skills to capture a piece of scenery and then use the artist in her to recreate it through painting. When Jan and Steve were first starting out in the art world, Jan was creating pieces that needed framing, especially if she wanted to put them in a gallery, which is naturally is pretty costly. “As an artist,” Jan says, “framing is very expensive.” It wasn’t long after her first show and hundreds of dollars spent in framing that her husband Steve decided he would help her out. “Jan needed a framer and then I said, ‘well, I can do that,’” Steve said. The rest, is history.

Steve Dominguez, Jan's husband and framer.

After becoming proficient in framing Jan's artwork, Steve began not only framing her art, but many others. This eventually lead Steve to make the difficult decision of quitting his career as a Biologist and starting their own personal framing business. The decision has since paid off, and of course, “we like making our own hours,” says Steve.

More of Jan's artwork located in her home gallery.

Now, Steve has merged his framing skills into digitizing and printing, creating a flawless team. “We’re vertical,” he says. “She does the creative part and makes the image, then I’ll digitize it and then frame it if we want to do that. Then we do all of our own marketing.”

“It helps us keep our cost down,” Jan adds. 

Steven and Jan Roberts-Dominguez in their home gallery.

Jan, the artist of many trades alongside her teammate and husband Steve, Art Publisher, Editor, and Framer are hoping to move forward into online sales and are taking a break from art shows this year. You can see many of Jan's pieces in the LaSells Stewart Center at OSU, read her weekly column in the Gazette Times called “Food For Thought,” or call and make an appointment to see her home gallery.

“it’s just plain fun to see your art everywhere,” she said.







Bibliography:

Jan Roberts-Dominquez and Steve Dominguez interviewed by Samantha Guy on June 6, 2018 Jan Roberts-Dominguez - About the Artist. (n.d.). Retrieved June 09, 2018, from http://janrd.com/about Meet the Artist: Jan Roberts-Dominguez - YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved June 09, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp0oZnodEnE Oregon Hazelnut Country. (n.d.). Retrieved June 11, 2018, from https://www.goodreads.com/work/best_book/15257840-oregon-hazelnut-country-the-food-the-drink-the-spirit Photographs by: Samantha Guy