Janice Mason Steeves

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...

I envy my musician son, Andrew Mason that he can play with other musicians to create music.  Most often visual artists don't collaborate.  As a painter, I work alone in my studio.  Once in a while though, I have the opportunity to create with another artist.   Rebecca Crowell and I don't paint together but we taught in June at Cullowhee Mountain Arts in North Carolina, in adjoining studios, and collaborated on a few class discussions.  Next year, we are considering co-teaching a workshop.  And right now, we have collaborated to write a co-blog which we began in March.  In 2011, Rebecca and I were fortunate to be invited to the  Tyrone Guthrie Centre  artist residency in County Monaghan, Ireland.  We wrote about that experience in our co-blog this past March.  Today we wrote a second instalment of our blog, this time about our experience at the  Cill Rialaig Project residency in County Kerry, Ireland. We went there toge...

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...

©Janice Mason Steeves 2011 A couple of weeks ago, Helen Hagemann , an Australian poet who was in residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at the same time I was, emailed to tell me that she had written a poem  inspired by one of my paintings she saw there.  A section of that painting took her eye.  I am honoured by this. I was also delighted at how my work was interpreted so differently than my intention as I created it.  I include her blog post here with her poem:   Her Blue Dress and encourage you to check out her website to read more of her poems and see the books she has written. Helen's writing this poem,  makes me consider sources of inspiration:  what inspires us, keeps us creating?  Maybe it's different for everyone. I have just finished reading " The Aran Islands ", written in 1907 by J.M. Synge , the famous Irish playwright.  He spent time on each of the three Aran Islands, mainly, Inish Mann where I visited in ear...

Thoughts of Stones    33 x 42" ©Janice Mason Steeves 2011   The last few days at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre were spent photographing around the lake (Annaghmakerrig), the buildings and the grounds, as though trying to gobble it up to hold in my memory. It was a stimulating, hard-working time for me.  I completed five multi-panel paintings of various sizes while I was at the residency.  My colours really changed for this period of time.  They became very muted, reflecting the greys of the stones at the neolithic sites, and the overcast skies and soft tones of the landscape. I'm already looking forward to another residency in Ireland next September. The best part of the residency was the intensely stimulating, creative contact with other artists: writers, musicians, poets, playwrights and visual artists.  Many gave spontaneous 'sessions' in the evenings where they improvised with other musicians, singers, poets or tap dancers.  What a...

After spending time in the sacred sites of Loughcrew , and   Newgrange, I have been wondering about the meaning of the carvings on the stones.  Were they a language of some sort, telling about the purpose of the cairns, did they track the entrance of the sun into the chambers, were they simply a kind of decoration?   When I came into my cottage here at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, I found some words scratched onto a heart-shaped slate that a previous tenant had left behind.  Lovely that the word is Brave.  The word 'courage' comes from coeur, French for heart.  Be Brave.  What a wonderful motto to begin my residency here.  And now I'm in the final few days of the residency and so I'm looking at my work and hoping that I have been brave. In response to the Be Brave carving, I found a Yeats quote about courage.  I did a small installation piece down by the lake, carving the quote onto some small slates that I found by the b...

Before I came to the artist residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centr e, I stayed with my friend Mary in Dublin whose passion is visiting the sacred sites across this country.  She took Rebecca Crowell and me out to Loughcrew, Slieve na Calliagh, the hill of the witch or hag's mountain.  Read Rebecca' s blog posts of this residency too. The remains at Loughcrew are passage tombs, a particular style of neolithic architecture.  They have a passage, ordinarily long and narrow, which opens into a domed chamber.  We first went to Carnbane East.  It was a long, rainy and wildly windy walk to the top of the hill to Cairn T (sometimes called the Hag's Cairn).  We had collected the key for the passage tomb at the Loughcrew Historic Gardens Coffee Shop.  Imagine that we were able to go into this cairn and sit inside, in the dark, beside these incredible stones! Cairn T is oriented to the autumn equinox, which happens within the next three days.  ...