Tiffanie Andrews and the art of wilderness

“Mountains,” Andrews said. “My parents lived up in Anchorage for a while and just being out in the vast wilderness, I just can’t think of anything else.”

Andrews on Dec. 5 strapped on a pair of skis and a Canon camera. The Blue Mountains had a dense white fog covering the top, allowing Andrews to see just a few yards ahead. Her three English Pointer dogs — Oliver, Stella and Piper — rush through the snow-blanketed hill with excitement and disappear into the mist.

“Hopefully it clears up as we get higher,” Andrews said.

She pulled out her camera, focused, snapped a photo and continued up the hill.

Early days of her lifeAndrews was raised in the West Hills of Portland. Her father was a civil engineer who worked for the federal Bureau of Land Management, and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. Her sister was five years older, and by the time Andrews reached high school her older sibling left the nest.

“In high school, I was a science and math person, but I played sports, primarily soccer, and I ran track,” she said. “Then I went to Willamette University in Salem with a talent scholarship and grant to play soccer.”

As she went through the soccer program, Andrews majored in psychology and minored in German. In her senior year, she had a full-year internship at the state hospital sex offender treatment ward, and after her internship, she worked in an alcohol and drug rehab.

“It was definitely different than anything I’ve ever been exposed to in my life growing up,” Andrews said. “I had a great childhood. My parents were extremely supportive of anything I did. They told me I could be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up, and I had the audacity to believe them.”

During her education, Andrews registered for her first drawing class and endured a negative experience with her art professor. According to Andrews, her professor focused on negative reinforcement rather than positive, calling out his student’s weaknesses.

“This is a broad overview of drawing techniques, and if he didn’t think the assignment was done to what he thought it should be, you were a complete failure,” Andrews said. “And, well, he had no problem telling you that.”

Andrews said she lost her motivation to get involved with creative work due to her professor’s teaching method and attitude.

Searching for the right career

At the university, she met Jeff, who was a chemistry major. They graduated and got married. Jeff worked for the Oregon State Police crime lab while she kept working for the alcohol and drug rehab. But the job became mentally draining, so she decided to pursue another career.

“I needed something else. It was just dark,” Andrews said. “You know, it wasn’t OK. Mentally draining. I needed something where I felt like I was making more of an impact.”

A friend of Andrews convinced her to take an emergency medical technician course. She registered for the class and immediately was hooked. As part of her training, she had to ride for more than 200 in an ambulance.

“I rode with Marion County Fire District and found out that they were taking fire volunteers,” Andrews said. “If I was a fire volunteer, I could ride on the ambulance anytime I wanted to. And I thought it was pretty cool. So I tried out and became a firefighter.”

She got her first paid firefighting job with Gresham Fire Department. Her husband, Jeff, was transferred to the Pendleton crime lab, and Andrews kept her position at her station. She commutes for three hours from Pendleton. She’s been with the department for 25 years and has been promoted to lieutenant on a fire engine and is part of the state hazmat team.

Returning to the creative worldIn 2014, Andrews came across a flyer in the newspaper for adult classes at the Pendleton Center for the Arts.

“I thought you know what, I haven’t taken an art class in a long time. This would be a lot of fun. So I signed up and showed up and I remembered I love to draw, and I remembered I was an artist,” she recalled.

Andrews rediscovered art. Her teacher, artist Shari Dallas, allowed her students to express themselves in a safe, creative space.

The two hours would fly by quickly. It was the only time when Andrews didn’t think of anything else going on in her life except drawing.

“It’s meditation,” she said.

Dealing with health mattersIn 2018, while Andrews was working on her creative endeavors, she was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer.

According to research from the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, firefighters have a 9% higher risk of being diagnosed with cancer. So she was on medical leave to begin her road to recovery and would commute from Pendleton to Portland for chemotherapy.

Due to her medical absence, Andrews had more free time on her hands. She decided to immerse herself in art. She focused and practiced with different media and techniques — watercolors, acrylics, pastels, brush strokes and more.

As part of her health exercise, she hiked with her husband and three dogs and brought her camera with her to capture her surroundings.

Art helped her escape as she struggled to keep a normal active lifestyle.

After enduring a long bout with breast cancer, chemotherapy and radiation, Andrews recovered just shy of one year and returned to work for the Gresham Fire Department.

“I didn’t want to be the firefighter with cancer,” Andrews said. “Art helped me stay really positive and not dwell. I didn’t let myself have downtime to worry about what I was going through.”

Working on art and mediation

Andrews works with drawing, painting and photography. She enjoys impressionism and abstract paintings and the works of Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keefe.

She communicates a calming presence through her personal drawings and paintings of still life objects. Her landscape brush strokes have smooth and rough textures to show physical character of the land and sky. Most of all, she begins her compositions intuitively unplanned through a sense of feeling.

“I like to depend on my mood,” Andrews said.

Her photographs are fleeting images captured from her hikes — candid stills of natural spaces, quiet valleys, streaming rivers and majestic mountains.

“There’s a place I go where there’s a lot of trees,” Andrews said. “We walk in and if it’s an evening, it’ll come in behind the trees and I can get that feeling. There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that starts ‘There’s a certain slant of light’ and every time I see that it’s what I think of.”

As she came down the Blue Mountains, the only sound audible was the crunching of boots going up the snowy slope. Jeff asked, “You hear that?”

Andrews stood still and scanned the fog.

“Nothing,” Jeff said with a smile. “Isn’t that great.”

Andrews and her husband smiled and trekked down the mountain.

“It’s my meditation. It is how I reset and am able to put positive good things out in the world,” Andrews said. “Not just in my art, but in my work and in my interactions with people and smile because it keeps me grounded and kind of quiets the noise.”