The Power of Limits and the Walls of Aran

I'm aiming to hold onto the feeling of Ireland for a while yet. Not so easy though since my re-entry into life hasn't exactly started. I've just recently returned from Edmonton, where my show, Memories of Home, opened on Saturday, Oct. 15th at the Agnes Bugera Gallery. Being in Edmonton, where I lived until I was 17, many memories of growing up under the big open sky of the Prairies came back to me.

In this suspended state between returning home from Ireland and opening my show in Edmonton, my thoughts keep returning to the stone walls on the island of Inish Mann. Perhaps it is because I was born in the Prairies that I felt so claustrophobic there, hemmed in by legions of stone walls. There I was, on the middle island of the Aran Islands, that is whipped by constant winds which blow up tumultuous, ever-changing clouds, and surrounded by a grey sea that is often covered by white frothy-capped waves. A wild, open environment. But there was not an inch of the island that was not covered with stone walls.

The physicality of such limiting walls, made me consider the idea of limits in art.

In her book," Prospect, the Journal of an Artist", Anne Truitt writes about going on a driving trip across Canada and arriving in Carberry, Manitoba. She said that she 'understood for the first time that limitlessness might be a threat, that it might induce the reverse of claustrophobia, a desire for enclosure, for protection from the naked eye of the sky." She muses that it would take a store of courage to live on land that so emphatically does not need a human hand, and that people may have fallen in love with the prairie, as sailors fall in love with the sea. Truitt wondered aloud to her travelling companion if they would "have been moved to art if we had been born on this prairie?"

Perhaps the reason for acres of stone walls on Inish Mann was for enclosure and protection. Surely the walls were built to clear stones from the land, as well as for protection from the wind and to create delineated pastures for the cattle and sheep. But because of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of walls, my sense is that something more is at play. The walls give limits against the limitless.

Creativity comes from limits, not freedom.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, in his book, "Free Play, Improvisation in Life and Art", says, "Sometimes we damn limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide us with something to work with and against. In practising our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design. Limits yield intensity. Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free', but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves."

The poet Wendell Berry writes:
"The impeded stream is the one that sings."

Liminal Time

The word liminal comes from the Latin, limen meaning threshold. an in-between place, a place of transition, a time of waiting and not knowing. Dawn and dusk are considered liminal places. Crepuscular animals, like foxes and coyotes are most active at this time of day, a time that is considered a magical time in Celtic spirituality and to Indigenous people which is perhaps the origin of their designation as tricksters. As I write this, the northern hemisphere has just passed the vernal equinox, where day and night are of equal length.We are in a liminal space between winter and spring right now, unsure if we will have one more storm or snowfall before spring finally settles in. We're also in a liminal place as we live through this pandemic with the anxiety and discomfort of not knowing. A time of great transition for the entire world, wondering what we've learned from this and what lessons we'll carry forward. Author and Fr...

Lessons that Stone Walls Teach

Dry stone wall in the Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland I've just returned from teaching a Workshop in Wild Places class in the Burren in County Clare, Ireland. Writing this post, I'm reminded of another post I wrote after visiting Inishmaan, the middle of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland several years ago. Stone walls crisscrossed the island in tight webs like a fisherman's net. I wrote then that the web of stone walls made me think of the idea of putting limitations on our painting as a way of exploring more deeply and how walls give limits against the limitless. You can read that article here. As our group hiked in the Burren with our guide, Marie McGauran we learned that the walls are stronger because of the holes in them. The wind can pass through. The oldest stone walls, estimated to be 3500 years old are at Skara Brae, a Neolithic site in Orkney. Most walls were built in the 18th and 19th century, marking areas of private ownership and resultin...

The Importance of Silence in Art

Gathering Light 60x60" Oil on canvas © 2014 Janice Mason Steeves Michael David Rosenberg, the musician known as Passenger, sings, "See all I need is a whisper in a world that only shouts." In the workshops I teach, I find that one of the most common problems with paintings is that they shout. Most have too much going on: too many small shapes, too much texture, extremes of colour, too many lines, too much, too much. One thing I say most often as I walk around the classroom working with students individually, is 'make bigger shapes'. But not only bigger shapes. Quiet shapes. Where can your eye go and rest in the painting? That isn't a consideration in much of contemporary painting or much of contemporary life. Ours is a noisy world both visually and auditorily. Ours is a world that shouts. People are afraid of silence. I wrote a blog post 3 years ago about planning a retreat in my own home, where I shut off the computer ...

Janice Mason Steeves

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