Janice Mason Steeves

White (from the Fragile Series)   60x72"   oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Fragile.  It's the name I gave to the series of paintings currently on exhibit at the Burlington Art Centre in Burlington, Ontario.  I was responding to the illness of a friend.  Little did I know then that I would have my own brush with fragility not once but twice during the month of December. Early in the month I was driving on a two-lane tree-lined road about 5km from home.   It was 5:45pm.   The roads were dry but it was dark. I heard the noise first. Something big hit the left side of my car.  In the next instant, the body of a deer completely covered my windshield. The glass shattered with the force of it.  I thought it was going to come in on top of me.  But it flew off as quickly as it had landed. I drove on, stunned and covered in glass, trying to see out of the smashed windshield, the wind whistling through the ...

Yellow 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves White 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Orange 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Blue 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Installation shot at the Burlington Art Centre My exhibition, In Search of Balance at the Burlington Art Centre in Burlington, Ontario, opened on Sunday, November 24th. In preparation, I needed to have some discussions about my work with the curator, Denis Longchamps, and to rewrite my artist's statement.  An exhibition in a public gallery is such a gift. Not only is it hung so beautifully, but the conversations with the curator and the preparation time, allow an opening into deeper consideration of the work and the long journey that led here.  I've taken the time in preparation, to think about where my work has come from, what truly is important to me, and how I a...

Green 5'x 6' oil/cold wax on canvas  ©2013 Janice Mason Steeves I'm preparing for an exhibition in November, at the  Burlington Art Centre  in Burlington, ON, a beautiful public gallery located on the western end of Lake Ontario. As is so often the case with art, if you can allow the process to unfold and trust that it will, amazing things can happen.  I believe that art is it's own spiritual journey. The paintings in this series have led me on such a journey. Last spring, Denis Longchamps, the Director of Programs, asked to come to my studio to see how the work was progressing. I had an idea for the show and had begun work on it. I had been working on a series of paintings I called Lines of Desire.  This series was an inner journey, where I was exploring my feelings related to the sudden life-threatening illness of a close friend. Denis liked the direction I was going and suggested we meet sometime in September to select work for the sh...

Brice Marden  Second Letter (Zen Spring)   Oil on linen    96 x 144 " After teaching my workshop at MISSA on Vancouver Island in July, I visited my artist friend, Barbra Edwards on Pender Island.  She was reading a book about the American abstract artist, Brice Marden, written by Eileen Costello.  I picked up a copy of the book when I came home. I love connections and interconnections between people and ideas and events. In my last post ( click here ),  I wrote about my brush explorations workshop, where I painted with red cedar brushes and ink, creating calligraphic forms.  In reading Eileen Costello's book on Brice Marden, I was excited to learn how Chinese calligraphy had such an enormous influence on his work. Another connection I had to Marden's work was that he was a pioneer in the use of cold wax medium and oil paint.  He was working with it for years before Gamblin started manufacturing it.  From 1965-1981...