Janice Mason Steeves

Fragile 22 50x50"  Oil/cold wax on panel  © 2014 Janice Mason Steeves In his book, Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch, an improvising musician,  wrote, "I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business; I am in the surrender business. Improvisation is acceptance, in a single breath, of both transience and eternity. Surrender means cultivating a comfortable attitude toward not-knowing, being nurtured by the mystery of moments that are dependably surprising, ever fresh". Last weekend, I taught a cold wax and oil painting workshop in my studio with eight artists, some of whom were very advanced.  I always teach the elements of design in my workshops-a good refresher for those who have studied them and an intro for those who have not.  One artist who is an accomplished figurative painter, had great difficulty dividing the painting surface into shapes.  I tried in various ways to help her understand what I was after, drawing some pi...

Fragile 18    29x29"  oil/cold wax on panel   ©2014 Janice Mason Steeves Sitting in my somewhat beaten-up but oh-so-comfortable studio chair the other day, considering a painting I was working on, I began to think of earlier work I had done that had some similarity to this new work.  I pulled out an old slide album from 1992.  I documented my paintings with slides in those days.  In 1992 I made my first foray into abstraction, spurred on by a trip to Baffin Island in Canada's arctic. I had the good fortune that year to travel with the well-known Canadian landscape painter, Doris McCarthy.  We travelled to Pond Inlet in the month of January when the sun had not yet returned to the arctic.  The thermometer in the window of our church/home remained at a steady -40C (which is the same as -40F)....maybe it was frozen at that temperature.  The wind chill took it to a place that was beyond reckoning.  Doris was 82 years old then a...

White (from the Fragile Series)   60x72"   oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Fragile.  It's the name I gave to the series of paintings currently on exhibit at the Burlington Art Centre in Burlington, Ontario.  I was responding to the illness of a friend.  Little did I know then that I would have my own brush with fragility not once but twice during the month of December. Early in the month I was driving on a two-lane tree-lined road about 5km from home.   It was 5:45pm.   The roads were dry but it was dark. I heard the noise first. Something big hit the left side of my car.  In the next instant, the body of a deer completely covered my windshield. The glass shattered with the force of it.  I thought it was going to come in on top of me.  But it flew off as quickly as it had landed. I drove on, stunned and covered in glass, trying to see out of the smashed windshield, the wind whistling through the ...