Steve Scheibe grew up on beautiful Offut Lake in Washington State, where he learned to swim, fish, and sail. His outdoor playground nurtured a knowledge of nature, seeing within nature, patterns of the unseen real. The order of nature as potent visual metaphor is the inspiration and crux of his artwork.
Steve's delight in nature led him to study life sciences at Washington State University. After graduating in the University Honors College and with a degree in visual art with an emphasis in graphic design, Steve moved to Africa, where he designed and illustrated books and magazines in a French publication center. He returned to the US, seeing his homeland now as through the eyes of an insider-foreigner. From this new perspective, he began creating his first exhibition art in graphite on cotton.
These first drawings led to creating in stone lithography with master-printer Craig Cornwall of Trilobite Press in Olympia. Steve moved to Alaska and continued his collaboration with Cornwall while printmaking at UAA. Alaska artists eventually introduced Steve to dye-painting silk and to public art in back-etched mouth-blown glass.
After years of creating public art in silk and in glass, Steve rediscovered painting. He presently creates in oils on large canvases, with imagery of the interplay of sunlight on moving water. He is ever-inspired by the waters of the nearby Deschutes River and his home again on Offut Lake.
Steve's artworks are in many private, public, and museum collections in the United States and Europe. 

Moving water awakens me. It quickens and arrests me.
Light on water mesmerizes and enchants me.
Nearness to water somehow strengthens and restores me.
It is these felt experiences of water’s influence on human emotions that I wish to share -- by painting the dynamic interplay of sunlight and moving water using transparent pigment oils on large-scale canvases.

Water is by nature abstract and sculpturally complex. It reflects, refracts, and magnifies light. It is at once a window, a mirror, and a prism.
To best portray the complexities of water, I employ loose, gestural underpaintings to imply movement, with layered, translucent glazes to convey water’s transparency, and more direct alla prima strokes for contrast and dynamism.
I layer transparent and opaque pigments, and juxtapose warm and cool hues to enhance an illusion of three dimensionality.
I render focal areas in realism for viewer recognition and connection. Other areas I paint loosely with emphasis on current and flow. Together, detail and poetic gesture combine resemblance with emotive energy, to engage the viewer’s imagination in an immersive experience.
While employing representational painting techniques, my compositions are neither traditional landscape nor still life. They are more of a macro view – looking in – as if wading in – into a composition intended to at once quicken and quiet the viewer’s heart, to awaken memories and invite a present and refreshing experience.
I paint the dance of sunlight and moving water not merely to convince the viewer of a likeness, but with physical and soulful dimensions intended to transport the viewer into an encounter (felt, remembered, or new) of the sublime.