Janice Mason Steeves

You feel the energy of the Camino right away at the retreat centre in the small village of Castrillo de los Polvazares. I've just returned from teaching  a workshop in Northern  Spain with Rebecca Crowell. Even though the Camino is about walking a sacred journey, about contact with the earth, I felt an ungroundedness, a sort of lightheadedness, an open vulnerability.  Basia Goodwin, one of the owners of the retreat centre, Flores del Camino, talked about the idea of the Camino being divided into three stages of personal growth, corresponding to the three distinct geographical regions. The first is the physical part, which is all about the difficulty of walking, the energy required, the blisters, the aching muscles. The second third is the mental/emotional part where the pilgrim is walking through the vast, treeless plains of the Meseta. There is much time for thinking about self, about life, about the reason for the journey. In this expansive place, d...

SCOTLAND Dunskey Castle, Scotland One thing I love to do is to organize workshops in gorgeous retreat centres or lodges or castles in remote areas of the world.  The intention in each of the workshops listed below, is to invite students, through various exercises and outdoor meditations, to connect with the landscape, to carry home that connection and translate it into abstract paintings. Contemplation, writing and painting are ways of connecting with and honouring the land. My friend  Rebecca  Crowell and I are finalizing plans to co-teach a workshop in a magnificent castle in Scotland, south of Glasgow in September 2019. Located near the sea, it has stunning views from the art studio on the top floor and 2000 acres of beautiful grounds to wander, including 2 lochs. We will stay in the West Wing. Registration for this workshop will open in September 2018.   www.dunskey.com NEWFOUNDLAND I'm in the process of planning a cold wax ...

Iceworks 48  12x15" Oil/cold wax on panel ©2018 Janice Mason Steeves Just a week ago, I was interviewed by Rebecca Crowell for her podcast: The Messy Studio. It was a very casual interview, especially because her "recording studio" in New Mexico where I was visiting her, was a blanket fort on the floor beside her bed! As I listened to the podcast last week when it was posted, I was reminded again how important the idea of play is in my own art practice. Click here to listen to the interview. Rebecca has observed that my work has a conceptual component and asked which comes first, the idea or the painting. I responded that it's always play that comes first, staying open to what wants to come through. No direction. No purpose. No worrying about whether anyone would like the work or not. Simply playing with materials. I realize I've written about play several times over the years. It still fascinates me: that state of not-knowingness. Of being open to ...

Last week I visited my artist friend, Rebecca Crowell  in New Mexico. Rebecca and her husband Don Ticknor have bought a property  north of Santa Fe, which Don is renovating and restoring.  Rebecca and I will be teaching a painting workshop in northern Spain in September and we needed time together to work on it. We spent part of each morning throwing ideas back and forth about the format of the workshop and came up with some creative plans. I realize that so many ideas I have come from books I've read about art and the creative process or TED talks or the podcast ON Being with Krista Tippett or simply talking to people. For example, in my workshops that take place in beautiful landscapes,  I often have my students choose a 'sit spot' outdoors, where they sit every day for 15 or 20 minutes to simply observe. This idea came from an outdoor workshop my daughter took with Jon Young, author, wildlife tracker and naturalist, who developed the daily sit spot p...

How do we access the felt experience of place and recreate it in our artwork? I love doing artist residencies because I can spend a few weeks in one place, getting to know it a little. In order to sense the land, I go for long walks alone, so I won't be distracted by conversation. I smell the air, listen to the particular sounds of the place, notice the colours and the light.  I take lots of photographs so I can keep those images in my mind. Sometimes I collect things: stones, feathers, odd bits and pieces. But mostly stones. I come home with my suitcase loaded with stones. For me they hold the energy of a place. The spirit of place is called the genius loci. In her book The Soul of Place, Linda Lappin writes, "Most people today might define the term 'genius loci' as the atmosphere or ambience of a locality or as the emotion or sensation that it evokes in us. To the ancient Romans, instead, it referred to an entity residing in a site and energizing it. In ...

Kultsjon Lake, Lapland, Sweden  Here at Ricklundgarden in the little village of Saxnas Sweden in Southern Lapland, Rebecca Crowell and I have just finished teaching a 7-day painting workshop. It was an incredibly memorable week for us all, from a campfire in the Sami kåta to a hike in the snowy, dreamy, treeless landscape of Stekenjokk near the border with Norway, to working in the studio here at Ricklundgarden.     Ricklundgarden studio Kåta Stekenjokk, Sweden We saw late late sunsets that lasted long into the night, and early morning sunrises only a few hours later in this land so close to the Arctic Circle. As a way of connecting to this powerful landscape, and as a time for contemplation and reflection, I asked the artists in the workshop to each find a quiet place to sit outdoors--a sit spot--where they would spend 15 minutes each day.  They were to return to the same spot each day at different times of day.  As part of that p...

      I am currently at Ricklundgarden , an artist residency in Southern Lapland, Sweden where I am co-teaching a painting workshop with Rebecca Crowell . This is the view out my studio window: Kultsjon Lake with snow-covered mountains behind it.  It was a journey to get here--a long flight from Toronto, a layover in Munich, overnight in Stockholm, a 90 min flight up to Vilhelmina and an hour long bus ride to the tiny village of Saxnas. We are only one hour south of the Arctic Circle here, so the days right now are about 18 hours long.  But it is twilight until long past midnight.   There are five artists in the workshop, three from Canada and two from Sweden who are working together in the bright studio of the main building. I'm ensconced in the cozy Annex next door to the main building where I have a beautiful studio overlooking the lake and the mountains beyond. Paradise.  There is much more snow here than we expected to find. There...