Janice Mason Steeves

Recently I was interviewed by Amy Guion Clay for her blog post on Artist/Travellers. Amy is an inveterate traveller and has gone to 17 artist residencies in the past number of years. When I first found her blog in 2011,  I was heading off to an artist residency in Can Serrat, Spain. Amy had just been there and was on her way to residencies around the world in a year she devoted to travel. Currently she's been to 17 artist residencies and has recently released an online video program  teaching all about artist residencies. She interviewed me because of my long-standing interest in art and travel. You can read the interview here. Cill Rialaig artist residency, Ireland. Out on Bolus Head with the Skellig Islands in the distance One's destination is never a place, but always a new way of seeing things.  Henry Miller

    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...

Dry Pigments from Montserrat Yesterday I received an email from Sandy Lambert, an artist who was in one of my painting workshops recently.  She is going to be painting in Ireland in September and was wondering if I could suggest exercises, an approach or technique to help her express a sense of place in her paintings.  Before Sandy's question, I hadn't spent time considering how I approached painting when I am in another environment.  It has just happened spontaneously and unconsciously.  Mine is a very tactile or kinaesthetic approach.  I particularly think of artist residencies in response to her question because the residencies I have attended were each 3 or 4 weeks in duration.  That length of time gave me the opportunity to get some sense of the place as well as time to work on a small body of work.  I don't ever seem to settle quickly into a place.  I find that I need to walk the land and explore for a few days to get over jet lag...

Just three of us left now at Can Serrat. On Saturday we had an exhibition of the work we´ve done while we have been at the residency.  Colores del Monasterio de Montserrat    174x201cm (68x79¨)   Janice Mason Steeves 2010  View of the studio/exhibition space Pinhole Cameras by Natalie McQuade 2010 Natalie McQuade exhibited a  video comprised of her black and white photographs of ceramic sidewalk tiles in Barcelona and El Bruc.  She also created a sculpture using three Spanish cigar boxes she found here that she made into pinhole cameras. Erica Scourti´s piece was a video remake of the movie Three Kings. My painting, called Colores del Monasterio de Montserrat was an edited assemblage of the more than eighty small acrylic/monastery pigment paintings I´ve made while I´ve been here.  The residency is over.  It´s getting cold here in ...

Erica Scourti at Can Serrat There are only two other artists here now.  The rest have finished their residencies. Can Serrat will close for December.  Things are winding down here.  But I still have eleven days left and will continue to absorb this area of Cataluña , Montserrat, El Bruc and Barcelona .  I´m loving spending time with the other artists and learning about their work.  Erica Scourti is an exceptionally creative artist/filmmaker from London, England who works mainly with digital media, and is interested in language/word-based video art. She has recently done a residency at I-Park in Connecticut.  Natalie McQuade at the Museu Nacional d Art de Catalunya Natalie McQuade is a brilliant multi-media artist from Melbourne, Australia . She incorporates sculpture, sound, installation and printmaking into her work ...among other things. At Can Serrat, among other projects, she is making several pinhole cameras out...

There are some beautiful hikes nearby the residency that eventually lead to Montserrat . I haven´t quite made it to the base of the mountain yet.  The weather here in the more mountainous region of Catalonia has been cool, around 14 degrees and mostly sunny. Great for hiking. Yesterday I went into Barcelona to meet up with my friend Rebecca Crowell and her husband Don Ticknor from the U.S.  We met up at the Fundacion Antoni Tapies  where we saw a small number of Tapies pieces and a terrific film about him and his work..  On the lower level of the museum was a retrospective of the work of Anna Maria Maiolino , an Italian-born artist who lives in Brazil. The Tapies website says that Maiolino´s ¨complex works have developed through a variety of media: poetry, woodcuts, photography, film, performance, sculpture, installation and, above all, drawing. The wide spectrum of subjects, interests and attitudes that underlies her work does not follow a linear devel...

I spent the day yesterday in Barcelona , which is less than one hour by bus from El Bruc and Can Serrat.  Easy access to the city center by Metro.  My destination was first, an art supply store...where I wasn´t too impressed by the supply of paint and paper....and then to the CCCB...the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona.   Before I left home I learned that there was an exhibition about the history of Labyrinths at the CCCB which runs until January 2011. I walked down Las Ramblas, the main pedestrian walkway, on my way to the CCCB.  It was bustling with excitement on a warm November day in Barcelona. A couple  dressed up for the crowd as though they were sculptures, and covered with something that looked like clay. Below is the entrance to the CCCB.  The exhibition I went to see was called ¨ Through the Labyrinth¨. This was a kind of video of people walking the labyrinth at Chartres, taken from above....

I arrived in Barcelona on Saturday October 31 for a one month artist residency at Can Serrat.  As we drove toward the town of El Bruc, an enormous rainbow arched over the highway  and stayed there for the entire drive to Can Serrat-definitely a good omen.  The residency is located in a little valley at the base of Monserrat-the serrated mountain, or Magic Mountain as it´s  called here.  The famous pilgrimage site, the Monastery of Montserrat, home of a Black Madonna is located on the other side of these mountains. I´m here for a month, along with five other artists: one other Canadian, a sculptor from New Brunswick; a film-maker from England; a performance artist from Barcelona via the US, who is here with her partner from  Honduras who a mixed media artist; and an artist from Australia.  Another American artist, a painter, just left today.  Two other artists are coming within the next two we...