Janice Mason Steeves

 Last January I published a blog post I called Exploring Awe in Art and Life . I wrote about travelling to Tofino, BC where I taught a Workshops in Wild Places class. While exploring the area, we met an incredible 1000-year-old red cedar tree. This year with Covid-19 and not being able to travel, experiences of awe are different. Instead of standing next to giant red cedar trees in the British Columbia rainforest or looking out over the moody Scottish landscape with its broad, inspiring vistas or watching powerful icebergs float down Iceberg Alley in Newfoundland, I look for awe much closer to home, in more ordinary places, like the forest behind my home. In my current zoom workshop, Workshops in Wild Places Stays Home, I talked to the artists  about having the intention to find awe in the land each time they go outside. If we look for the experience of awe, of course we find it. It's what I try to do. Sometimes of course, I am deep in thought as I enter the forest, or I'm pon...

Gathering Light 27   60x60"  Oil on canvas ©2014 Janice Mason Steeves "To have a sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so, where you do not know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody or what they owe you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be." Joseph Campbell In an earlier post , I wrote about my own process of lighting a candle as I begin my day in the studio .  And in my workshops, I have a little ritual of beginning.  I start each day with a meditation or a poem. I read poems by Mary Oliver or David Whyte or John O'Donohue among others. At home, I like to start each day slowly and quietly.  When my children were little, I would wake up before them to have a few quiet moments before the hectic day began.  And in the same way, I like to approach my day of work in the studio in a quiet, though...

Silence 30 50x50"  oil/cold wax on panel © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves When I return from a journey,  I let the experience wash through me, not knowing what effect it will have on my work. I just begin to work, and after I have a few paintings under my belt,  I stand back to see what's happening.  Then I realize that it could be a colour I saw that influenced me or the lines on the standing stones, or even something someone said to me. I always find that I am slow to really settle into a trip, especially when it requires that I paint.  For me, painting is about place; my relationship with the place I am in.  In his new book: The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot , Robert MacFarlane says that "the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?  And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?" I painted in the beautif...

Influence of Hue 40 x 40" oil/cold wax on panel ©2011 Janice Mason Steeves Each time I begin a painting, I wonder where it will go.  I begin intuitively,  holding a thought in my mind of what I'd like to express. My   paintings are abstract investigations of landscape, symbols, memory and process.  I know artists who are fully confident that even if they can't see what the finished painting will look like, trust that the process will resolve itself and become a painting.  I can't say that I am so confident.  When I step into the studio each day, I feel to some extent that I'm stepping into the abyss. This is the excitement of abstract painting.  I have no idea where the work will go or how I will get there or if it will resolve itself.   And yet they do, they always eventually do. I love that razor's edge though, between safety and the abyss.  I think it keeps the work honest.  There is some sense of terror there! ...