Janice Mason Steeves

After I finished teaching my cold wax painting workshop at the Baer Art Center in northern Iceland, I stayed on to do a two-week residency. When I left home, I had some idea of what I wanted to paint in those two weeks. I was going to paint the subtle colours of Iceland day by day in a very minimal way. However, after doing several of the minimal paintings, I had no interest in doing more.  As usual, the paintings led the way and it seemed that that was not what I was going to paint.  So I started again where I'd left off last year when I did a month-long residency at Baer.  The paintings soon morphed into different forms, taking on the textures and colours around me, particularly the textures on the rocks I found on the stony beach in front of the Art Center. ©2017 Janice Mason Steeves ©2017 Janice Mason Steeves Gradually changing. ©2017 Janice Mason Steeves ©2017 Janice Mason Steeves ©2017 Janice

In an earlier blog post , I wrote about breathing in the spirit of place. Some places however, resonate with us while others do not, for whatever reason. I remember travelling once by sail boat to the Queen Charlotte Islands (now called Haida Gwaii), off the west coast of Canada. We anchored at the abandoned Haida villages along the way and took a dingy into shore to walk the land. I had brought along painting supplies, fully intending to sit and paint along the way. I found that I couldn't. Perhaps it was the energy of the land that had a long and sad history. I never did any work from that trip. I resonate with Iceland––the space and the solitude here on this remote horse farm and artist residency in Northern Iceland. “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness… True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation." Wendell Berry  In the painting workshop I taught here two weeks ago, I had a goal of trying