Cill Rialaig -Last Day

Endings and beginnings. As I pack up, I also wrap up in my mind what I take away from this place. One of the biggest lessons I've learned is about the gift of letting the day unfold as it will,. My friend Rebecca Crowell wrote a wonderful post about learning to follow her intuition. Of course this is always the case in painting abstraction where you have to trust that what you do will eventually resolve itself into a painting. But this journey to Cill Rialaig has helped with that lesson. In some cases, I've been forced to stay in the moment as in driving a car with a stick shift on the wrong side of the road on steep single-track roads with no guard rails, around corners where you can't see what's coming. I am totally in the moment then!

It's been important to give in to the beauty of the day and to the rhythm of life here. Some days have been grey, overcast and windy where the studio skylight is pelted with rain and small bits of hail. It was good to stay inside and focus on my work those days. But many days have cleared at some point to glorious, blue skies and it was impossible to stay indoors. Giving in to the rhythm of the weather has been important. I love that changeability. My cottage looks out onto the Ballinskelligs Bay and the islands of Scariff and Deenish. I have taken hundreds of photos of those islands with the changing skies over them. The light and sky change by the hour. Yesterday a cloud nestled right down on Cill Rialaig and I couldn't see the islands at all.

I wrote in a post from home just before I left that I was looking forward to experiencing that thin place between the worlds. I can feel this at some of the ancient sites. The trip here has been expanding in many ways. That's the blessing of travel--the way it cracks open my mind and breaks me out of my daily life and routines, forces me to try out new ways of living, and keeps me in the moment. Simply following the unfolding of the day has been important. It brought us to the ancient hermitage site up the road, just when the biggest rainbow I'd ever seen, shone over the bay. Our spontaneous decision to stay for the night after we'd seen Rebecca's artist friend, gave us time the next day to visit the Irish artist Charles Tyrrell, whose work Rebecca and I saw in Dublin last year at the Royal Hibernian Academy. He lives at the far end of the Beara Peninsula in a very remote place. Getting there was a journey itself , stunning views and terrifyingly narrow, steep roads but it was a delight to visit his home and studio and chat about painting. He was most generous with his time and his conversation.

Later that day we had time to visit the incredible stone circle at Uragh.

My work has moved in directions I would not have expected but then I came here with the idea of letting it move and change with the energy of the place, working mainly in black and white. Although this work is not about the land in a direct way, it is heavily influenced by the land. How can it not be, with the stunning views on clear days and the wind and rain sometimes lashing at the cottage on others?

Cill Rialaig November 2012 © Janice Mason Steeves

Rebecca leaves for home on Friday and my journey continues to Scotland. I will miss this rather primitive little cottage with it's paint-splattered concrete floor, the steep ladder to the bed/loft area and the old plastic radio with it's big dial tuned to the RTE Lyric station. This afternoon I'll walk up to the hermitage site where I've been so many times now and sit for a while in that prayerful place. Thank you to all who are involved with making Cill Rialaig available for artists. Thanks to this land and to the ancestors. Go Raibth Maith Agat.

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...

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Am I Too Old to Change? Embracing Life

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels I'm in the process, at last, of working on the book that came to me in a dream seven years ago. It has circled my head all these years, demanding I get at it. It's called: We're Not Done Yet: Coming to Art Later in Life . It has actually hung in the air a couple of feet behind my head, attached by a string like a helium balloon, like a cartoon cloud, waiting for me to get to it. Some of you will know of it because I posted a request on Facebook in 2019 asking for artists who have come to art later in life to reply to me if they'd like to answer a questionnaire. I received 168 responses plus earlier interviews I did before the put out the questionnaire. There was some overlap, and some didn't respond after they'd offered to. All in all, I received 128 responses. By a huge majority it was women who responded to my questionnaire. By the time we get into our 60's we bring a rich life experience to our work: m...

Janice Mason Steeves

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