From Cill Rialaig 12x112" acrylic on canvas © 2012 Janice Mason Steeves There are always threads aren't there, that connect one thing and another in our lives. I wrote last week about the threads that connected many events in my life that week. This week I found some new connections. In preparing a slide presentation for Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts near Victoria, BC, where I'll be teaching next week, I've been looking at images of the paintings I did at my artist residency at Cill Rialaig in Ireland last fall. I haven't looked at the work for a while and in fact tended to dismiss it as only experimental work. I've put it on a shelf in my studio and haven't looked at it since I came home last December. My artist talk is about Journeys: a short version of how I came to be doing the work I'm doing now-where it came from, what influenced it, and what I learn from it. Sometimes we don't know the strength of a pai...