Maybe you’ve had the singular pleasure of taking in Claude Monet’s paintings of water lilies, but you haven’t seen Erin Hanson’s paintings of Monet’s water lilies.

She finished them in the past few weeks, capping an artistic pilgrimage that took her through France over the summer. She visited the gardens at Giverny where the founder of Impressionism lived and worked, and other environs where the renowned artistic rebels of the period, including Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, produced their most famous work.

“I went there four times over two days at different times of day,” she said of visiting Monet’s garden. “I got as close to sunrise and sunset as I could.” Unfortunately, she couldn’t engage in any plein-air action. “They don’t let people paint,” she told me. “There are so many people there, there would be no way.”

Instead, she took pictures — around 10,000 of them over several weeks as she followed in the footsteps of the Impressionists.

The resulting collection of oil paintings, Reflections of the Seine: Inspirations from France, will be unveiled Sept. 14 at the Erin Hanson Gallery in McMinnville.

You can find images of these and other paintings on Hanson’s sprawling website. But it’s worth a trip in person, as it’s pretty safe to say you’ve never seen a gallery quite like this one, and it’s not one you would just happen upon strolling along downtown’s bustling Third Street.

Meandering through McMinnville’s industrial park, following signs to the gallery, you might wonder why an artist who isn’t, say, sculpting massive pieces too large for a home studio, would be located out here.

Barely half a mile to the north is a steel mill. Across the road, nearly 30 grassy acres are for sale. The nearby factories notwithstanding, it’s pretty quiet. If it feels like you’ve arrived at the edge of town, it’s because you have.

Upon entering the gallery, you’re greeted by little more than a dozen or so of Hanson’s impressionistic paintings, the bright colors popping off blackberry-colored walls, serenely lit for contemplative viewing.

This is just a fraction of the 18,000-square-foot facility that sprawls across two identical, nondescript rectangular buildings that look more like warehouses.

What more could there be?

Hanson, a 43-year-old artist from Southern California who made her home in Yamhill County and opened the gallery in 2021, does all her painting here in a spacious studio, where she produces at least one but as many as four pieces every week.

Between a lobby — where her biography unfurls in columns of text and pictures along one wall — and her studio, there’s a wide passage where dozens of her paintings dry on racks like loaves from a bakery oven. Some likely already have been purchased.

Elsewhere, you finally get the vibe of a building in an industrial park. There are two extraordinary and very expensive pieces of equipment, a scanner and a printer, the latter large enough to easily occupy a couple of parking spaces. Each has its own room. More on those later.

Then there’s the other building, where Hanson’s canvases are hand-stretched and custom-framed; paintings are packaged in cardboard that is custom-cut, then shipped to customers around the world. It takes a crew of around 10 to run this show to keep up with sales to collectors. The artist’s social media accounts give a glimpse of her audience: Her Instagram account has more than 290,000 followers, while 59,000 follow her on Facebook.

I’ve been to the gallery several times, and it’s always astonishing: a sprawling nexus of beautiful, high-end art, savvy entrepreneurship, state-of-the-art technology, and light industry.

“It’s a great system,” said Hanson’s marketing director, Amy Jensen. “It was definitely an evolution to get to this stage. I came in when social media was barely used for marketing purposes, and the idea that you could really control your career as an artist autonomously without having to go into other galleries and stuff like that, that was still kind of a new concept.”

That’s not to say Hanson hasn’t had work in other galleries — that was among the many steps in her career’s evolutionary ladder.

Born in Portland in 1981, she got on that ladder when she was around 7 years old, learning techniques from professionals in a private Delphi school in Los Angeles. She was commissioning work by age 10; at 12, she worked after school in a mural studio. Graduating at 16 with a scholarship, she studied at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. However, initially listening to those who said an artistic career wasn’t a smart move, she went on to get a degree in bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Her self-described style of “Open Impressionism” was birthed in 2006. She’d moved to Las Vegas but was unable to use her apartment because the power was off. So, she went camping at Red Rock Canyon, where she got her first glimpse of its red and orange majesty at dawn. She painted it, then kept painting. 

From her wall bio in the lobby: “If the electricity had been turned on in my apartment like it was supposed to have been, I may never have developed Open Impressionism.” She was 25 years old and resolved to do one painting a week. Nearly 50 paintings of the Nevada desert followed.

The trip led to more rock climbing and a lot of national parks, where she gathered the visual ingredients for more painting. That led to gallery shows and eventually her own galleries in Carmel, Calif., and Scottsdale, Ariz. She closed those a few years ago, so she could have a high-tech conveyor belt for her work and staff under one roof.

“I have a unique model, and the people who work with me really need to understand my story and be able to talk about me and explain why a painting like this,” she said, gesturing to Impressions of France, the in-progress mural-sized canvas in front of her, “is a hundred thousand dollars.”

To understand the “open” part of Hanson’s style of Impressionism, it’s useful to recall how Monet and his colleagues made such a splash in the European art scene of the late 1800s. Artists of the day took on Big Topics: historical events and figures, biblical subjects. “The art was very realistic, and very dark,” Hanson said. “They’d use many, many layers and it would take months to finish a painting.”

Monet and company — artists such as Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, and Jean Frédéric Bazille, for example — broke from that perspective and instead attempted to capture the ephemeral dance of light and color in everyday scenes in and around Paris.

Hanson gravitated to that style, but “took it one step further” while also striving to capture the stirring emotions more associated with Expressionism.

“I don’t do any blending on the canvas at all,” she said. “I premix all my colors here on the palette. I try to think of every color that’s going to come into the painting, all the different shades, shadow colors, the water, the lily pads, the cloud colors. By the time I start, I’ve done all the hard work. I’ve reverse-engineered my painting. That way I can work quickly, and I try to put my brushstrokes side by side without overlapping.”

The result is a painting with a mosaic quality. “I work very quickly,” she said. “It gives the colors a very pure look.”

That pure look is also captured by high-tech for both canvas and paper prints and textured replicas. Shortly after a painting is finished, Hanson’s crew carries the piece down the hall, where it is scanned with a state-of-the-art industrial Epsom printer manufactured in Germany.

“I was just looking for a really good way to photograph my paintings,” she said. “If you scan them face down, you lose all the texture. This is a way-more expensive scanner, where the light comes from above; you have more control over how light hits the surface.”

Elsewhere in the building, an even larger device creates limited-run 3-D replicas that are indistinguishable from the originals. Gallery visitors can check the quality themselves. Three identical paintings — the original, a print, and a replica — are mounted side by side for a close inspection.

Given how early Hanson started painting and that she’s been at it for a couple of decades, I asked her what she’s learned about painting.

“I’ve learned it’s very hard to correct a mistake once it goes up,” she said. “It’s easier to do it right the first time.” Mistakes inevitably do happen, and therein lies another lesson.

“Each painting doesn’t need to be a masterpiece,” she said. “I can learn from each painting and then do it better again the next time, instead of sinking all my time into being a frustrated artist and trying to ‘fix’ my paintings like when I was first starting out. The thing that turned me into a professional was actually finishing my paintings.”

Monet began his artistic work as a teenager and by his death at age 86 in 1926, he’d made more than 2,500 paintings. Hanson estimates she’s finished around 3,000 paintings, including the $100,000 one she was working on when I visited her. It sold last month.

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The Erin Hanson Gallery is located at 1805 N.E. Colvin Court on the east side of McMinnville. Along with original paintings, prints, and replicas, the gallery has coffee table books and calendars featuring Hanson’s works. Walk-in hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. The gallery website also features an active blog about painting, videos, and other features. For more information, call 503-334-3670.