Janice Mason Steeves

Lines of Desire 1368  8x8"  Oil/cold wax on panel © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves  July was a busy month of teaching Abstract Painting with cold wax and oil workshops:  a 5-day workshop at Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts on Vancouver Island, a 3-day workshop in Vancouver and then another 5-day workshop at the Haliburton School of the Arts in Ontario. While I teach the technique of working with cold wax with oil,  my workshops are about painting.   I try to make the structure of my workshops very simple and clear.  It's a step-by-step process, each day building toward the next day.  Five-day workshops add a slowness to the pace that is difficult to create in a 3-day workshop.  It takes a couple of days for students to settle into the process-learning a new technique and then letting go of expectations that a painting should be produced in the first two days.  I think that one of the most important messages I was ...

From Cill Rialaig  12x112" acrylic on canvas © 2012 Janice Mason Steeves There are always threads aren't there, that connect one thing and another in our lives.  I wrote last week about the threads that connected many events in my life that week.  This week I found some new connections. In preparing a slide presentation for Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts near Victoria, BC, where I'll be teaching next week, I've been looking at images of the paintings I did at my artist residency at Cill Rialaig in Ireland last fall.  I haven't looked at the work for a while and in fact tended to dismiss it as only experimental work.  I've put it on a shelf in my studio and haven't looked at it since I came home last December.  My artist talk is about Journeys: a short version of how I came to be doing the work I'm doing now-where it came from, what influenced it, and what I learn from it. Sometimes we don't know the strength of a pai...