Janice Mason Steeves

With Naomi Gerrard in Winnipeg, Manitoba Over the past couple of years in my workshops, students have asked about getting one-on-one feedback or doing private critiques with me.  But one artist in a workshop this past summer,  Jill Segal,  suggested that I do an art mentoring program.  Thanks to her encouragement, I'm just launching it. The Art Mentoring Program is intended as a distance mentoring program, to provide one-on-one guidance to artists no matter where they live.  The goal is to give artists feedback on their artwork and help them develop a cohesive body of work. There are few opportunities for artists to receive clear feedback and guidance about their work.  Our artists friends are generally reluctant to offer anything other than encouragement, even though they may think differently about certain of our paintings.  Encouragement is definitely helpful.  We all need that. But where do we get clear feedback?  Hard to find...

Fragile (1370)  30x30"  Oil/cold wax on panel © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves   In the film, "With My Back to the World",  the artist Agnes Martin talks about how the ideas for her paintings come to her in a flash of inspiration.  In fact, she painted directly from those visions, carefully working out the mathematical division of space.  When she finished a painting, she would simply wait until the next 'inspiration' came to her and didn't paint until it did. Once she had to wait 7 months, she said. My own ideas seem to come to me in  various ways.  Sometimes, like Agnes, I get a picture in my head of a painting.  I never can paint the exact image because I see it only vaguely. It's rather like an idea for a painting or an idea for a series of paintings.  I find that ideas keep coming the more I work.  So many artists and musicians have said that.  Twyla Tharp said that in her book, "The Creative Habit", as did the...