Janice Mason Steeves

    Whether we know it or not, when we embark on the journey of becoming an artist, we open up. We have to. It’s part of the process. And it’s in that process that we create ourselves. The artist's voice is a mixture of style, technique, and the message they wish to impart. But that can change. It’s not fixed in stone.  Kirkegaard said, “We create ourselves by our choices”. Many years ago I made the choice to become a painter. It was for me, a life-altering decision. It took a long time to make that decision and then more time to call myself an artist. First I chose to work in watercolour, then later, in oils. I chose first of all to paint landscapes and still life, moving much later into dark and mysterious paintings of vessels. Choice. Choice. Choice. I continued to make choices about my subject matter and as I grew as an artist and a person, so my work continued to change.  Eventually I moved into abstraction, where the wor...

I Had a Sweater This Colour ©Janice Mason Steeves 2011        My work of the past year has been one of going into the studio with no preconceived idea of what I will do.  I enter in a spirit of play  I am balancing the technical skills I have learned over many years as an artist in one hand, with the idea of knowing nothing in the other. "The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing ." This quotation, attributed to Hemingway, (or was it Henry Miller?) is about this balancing point of knowing it all and knowing nothing.  In the  excellent book, The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharpe , she says, "You cannot manufacture inexperience, but you can maintain it." "In it's purest form, inexperience erases fear.  You do not know what is and is not possible and therefore everything is possible". There is a surrender to the process, a giving up of control to the dialogu...