8A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 2015
Cannon Beach artist Steve McLeod left strong legacy
Painter, sculptor
contributed to
study of ocean
currents
By ERICK BENGEL
EO Media Group
CANNON BEACH —
Steve McLeod, 70, a versa-
tile Cannon Beach artist and
ardent beachcomber, died of
pneumonia May 11 at Port-
land’s Providence St. Vincent
Medical Center three days
after being transferred from
Providence Seaside Hospital.
“He was by himself,” said
his friend Dave Butler. “He
chose to be by himself.”
An evolving artist known
for seascapes, abstract paint-
ings, and pieces composed
of dried kelp, jetsam and oth-
er beach detritus, McLeod’s
work resides in homes, galler-
ies and other establishments
throughout town.
“His paintings are ev-
erywhere,” former Cannon
Beach Mayor Mike Morgan
said. “He’s very well thought
of in the Paci¿c Northwest.”
Robin Risley, a Cannon
Beach resident, said McLeod
“took life seriously.” In his
art, “you saw a technical dis-
cipline that he had, and I think
he kind of approached life that
way, too. He wanted to dig
into the details ... to make
sense of everything.”
McLeod is also famous
as the person who, in the
early ’90s, began collect-
ing and selling hundreds of
Nike sneakers that washed
ashore along the West Coast
— and especially the Ore-
gon Coast — after the com-
pany’s shipping containers
en route to Seattle fell over-
board and broke open. Mc-
Leod’s notes on where the
shoes ran aground proved
valuable to the scientific
study of ocean currents.
“He lived close to the
rhythms of the tides and of
the forests,” said Watt Chil-
dress, co-owner of Jupiter’s
Rare and Used Books. “He
really loved this place.”
A memorial service will
held 6 p.m. June 24 at the
American Legion Post 168.
Beach scenes
Born Aug. 17, 1944, in
Long Branch, N.J., under
the name Steven McLeod
Woodward, he was raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area,
served in the U.S. Coast
Guard and earned a bach-
elor of arts degree at Utah
State University. He adopt-
ed “Steve McLeod” as his
artistic signature, though he
never legally changed his
given name, his older broth-
er, Wayne Woodward, said.
In the early 1970s, Mc-
Leod settled into Arch Cape
and, later, Cannon Beach,
where he and other local art-
ists, including Frank Lack-
aff and Bill Steidel, helped
shape the town’s identity as
an arts colony.
McLeod co-founded the
White Bird Gallery with
Evelyn Georges in 1971 and
displayed his work there
and in other regional galler-
ies.
For years, McLeod most-
ly painted realistic beach
scenes featuring things like
dories, Haystack Rock, the
Tillamook Rock Lighthouse
and the Columbia River —
work that Cannon Beach
resident Marilyn Rooper
called “absolutely gor-
geous.”
“His paintings were
masterful,” Cannon Beach
resident Karolyn Adamson
said. “What he could do
with light on water was just
magical.”
Steidel said McLeod
was “rather shy and bashful
about his work.”
“But, at the same time,
he was very proud about
what he did,” Steidel said.
“In my mind, he was one of
the best artists that Cannon
Beach has had.”
ERICK BENGEL — EO Media Group
In honor of his life, one of
McLeod’s kelp sculptures,
which he made many of in
his later years, sits in the
window sill of The Bistro in
downtown Cannon Beach.
spoils of his beachcombing,
particularly plastic and Sty-
rofoam litter.
“He was looking for
things that were not useful
to anybody else, stuff that
had washed up,” Wayne
Woodward said. McLeod,
a consummate environmen-
talist, didn’t like to see trash
on the beach. “He was try-
ing to find useful ways to
use that, so he would make
sculptures out of it.”
Some of McLeod’s final
work consisted of landscape
imagery painted onto small
cardboard wine boxes. “I
believe (the wine boxes)
allowed Steve to experi-
ment with this style without
having to commit with large
expensive canvases or fram-
ing,” White Bird Gallery
owner Allyn Cantor said.
Though McLeod’s later
work didn’t sell nearly as
well as his more accessible
seascapes, Sharon Amber,
a Cannon Beach artist, told
him his abstract work was
top-notch. McLeod told her,
“‘This is what’s in my heart.
This is what I really like to
do,’” she said.
“A lot of people don’t
understand abstract art,” she
said. “If he could have tak-
en it to New York, he would
have been famous, I think.”
Rooper said that true art-
ists, like McLeod, “wants to
go places where he hasn’t
been, moving on, trying
new things.”
Pierre Toutain-Dorbec,
who was collaborating with
McLeod on photo book of
three-dimensional
land-
scapes based on the artist’s
sculptures before he died,
said Steve was a “true free
spirit,” which is very rare,
he said.
Soles lost at sea
Had McLeod never pro-
duced a single work of art, he
still would have achieved a
kind of immortality thanks to
the Great Sneaker Spill of 1990.
On May 27, 1990, a
freighter sailing from Seoul,
South Korea, lost 21 steel
containers; five held tens of
thousands of Nike sneakers,
four of which broke open,
spilling 61,280 shoes into
the North Pacific Ocean.
The floating footwear even-
tually turned up along the
coastlines of British Colum-
bia, Washington and Ore-
gon, according to a column
by flotsam expert Curtis
Ebbesmeyer and journalist
Eric Scigliano.
When
Ebbesmeyer
met McLeod, the scientist
learned that the “classic
starving artist” had gath-
ered beached Nikes from
Cannon Beach, Arch Cape,
PIERRE TOUTAIN-DORBEC photo
Steve McLeod, 1944-2015, works in his studio last year. Before he died last month, he had been collaborating with local
writer, photographer and former photojournalist Pierre Toutain-Dorbec on a photo book of three-dimensional land-
scapes based on McLeod’s sculptures and the objects McLeod collected on the beaches in the area.
ERICK BENGEL — EO Media Group
This oil painting by Steve McLeod currently hangs in The
Bistro in downtown Cannon Beach. The painting is an ex-
ample of McLeod’s early landscape work, which was quite
popular.
Tillamook and elsewhere,
recorded the location where
each was found, sold many
of them and sometimes in-
corporated the shoes into
his art, Ebbesmeyer wrote.
What’s more, McLeod
had networked with other
beachcombers, arranging
swap meets and trade fairs
where owners of ocean-
borne Nikes could acquire
the missing mates.
Ebbesmeyer used Mc-
Leod’s information to re-
fine his models of ocean
currents. The Smithsonian
Institution put on an exhi-
bition illustrating current
flows that included some of
McLeod’s Nikes, Cannon
Beach resident Peter Lind-
sey said.
‘More caterpillar
than butterfly’
By all accounts, McLeod
was kind and intelligent,
known for hiking and forag-
ing in the North Coast wil-
derness and living softly on
the land.
While surviving on his
art, McLeod secured a few
patrons and held down part-
time jobs. He often ven-
tured into the nearby forest
reserves to hunt for chan-
terelle mushrooms and sell
them to restaurants.
“Steve was an extreme-
ly wiry, agile person who
could get across the land-
scape quite handily,” Lind-
sey said.
McLeod lived an inde-
pendent and intensely pri-
vate life, which bordered
on reclusive, Wayne Wood-
ward said.
“He was more caterpil-
lar than butterfly, socially
speaking,” Childress said.
McLeod told his fami-
ly that, upon his death, he
wanted all of his artwork
and belongings given away.
So, late last month, his older
brother, Wayne Woodward,
and Woodward’s wife, Mar-
ci Woodward, opened Mc-
Leod’s loft apartment, just
west of the Coaster Theatre,
for the community to take
what they wanted. His paint-
ings were claimed in no time.
“The community was his
family, too,” Marci Wood-
ward said.
Days before he died, Mc-
Leod told his brother that
he was “pretty happy with
his life,” Wayne Woodward
said.
PIERRE TOUTAIN-DORBEC photo
Steve McLeod relaxes in his studio last year. The artist,
who lived behind the Coaster Theatre for about 40 years,
passed away May 11 from pneumonia.
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A new direction
Then, Picasso-like, he
entered a new period. His
paintings grew less repre-
sentational, more impres-
sionistic. He began creating
kelp-and-seaweed
sculp-
tures and collages and other
artwork fashioned with the
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