Janice Mason Steeves

The work at Gallery Stratford awaiting installation I'm enjoying a small pause in my work cycle.  My studio is bare and quiet. My solo exhibition called Gathering Light , will open at the beautiful and spacious Gallery Stratford in Stratford, Ontario  on January 25th.  It runs until April 7th.  Over the Christmas holidays I was busy with the details of preparing the work to be sent off: sanding edges, attaching hanging hooks, documenting, cataloguing and wrapping the work.  Twenty-seven paintings were sent off on Monday. Gathering Light 25 (1455)  60x60"  Oil on Canvas ©2014 Janice Mason Steeves I've worked for months on this exhibition, flowing on a stream of high energy that carried me along and at times exhausted me.  It's exciting this business of art.  We put ourselves in the path of the Gods so they will carry us along.  And if we do this consistently we find a deep in...

Gathering Light 28A   60x60"   Oil on canvas  ©2014 Janice Mason Steeves In my work this past year, I have been focusing on light, preparing for my exhibition in January at Gallery Stratford, in Stratford, Ontario.  I write this on the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year.   Ancient people knew about light.   They spent hundreds of years building stone circles and passage graves, orienting them to the sunlight or moonlight at solstices and equinoxes. Light was sacred to them.   Inner light and the oneness of the world were ideas sacred to the monks on Iona.  Besides spending time this past fall visiting a passage grave in Ireland, and walking the ancient stone circle of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, I attended a retreat on the island of Iona in Scotland. It was here that Celtic Christianity was brought into Europe.  I decided to metaphorically gather some of that light--from Iona and from the passage graves and st...