Janice Mason Steeves

I'm settling into my residency at the Baer Art Center in Iceland. It's been nearly a week now and my eyes and mind are filled with many sights that are so different from the part of the world where I live (in the country outside of Toronto, Canada). The residency is located on a farm near the town of Hofsos in Northern Iceland on the shores of a fiord called Skagafjordur. The owners breed Icelandic horses. One of the most exciting things our group of five residents has done, was to hike up into a nearby valley, after being dropped off part way up. We passed through a couple of cattle gates and across a small river to where the horses are allowed to run free for the summer. They were curious, and cautiously came toward us and surrounded us, allowing us to pat them. Yesterday, we drove around the north part of the peninsula, through three tunnels, that connect formerly isolated towns. One of the tunnels was a one-way road, built in 1967, narro...

Potential art supplies to pack I'm wondering what to pack for my artist residency at the Baer Art Center in Iceland that's coming up in a week. It's the art supplies that are the problem really. What do I pack? What will I work on? How can I know? Do I limit myself in advance? It won't be easy to get more art supplies once I'm there.  It's not only the opportunity to travel that I'm looking forward to, but to be allowed an entire month to spend on my painting and my writing is a huge gift.  I like the freedom an artist residency allows me, to explore new ideas, new ways of working. "We travel, initially to lose ourselves and we travel next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate", says Pico Iyer in his essay, "Why We Travel". "Yet for me", he goes on to say, "the first great joy of travelling is simply the luxury of ...

About six weeks ago I had eye surgery for a retinal detachment. A bad fall I had in my home just two days before the operation, further detached the retina. I was terrified of losing my vision. During the retinal laser surgery two days later, the surgeon inserted a gas bubble into my eye to help hold the retina in place, a standard procedure for retinal detachments. It totally obscured my vision and from the inside it felt like I was looking out through glasses where one lens was smeared with vaseline. The procedure for the first week was to keep my chin elevated during the day so the gas bubble would float against a particular part of my retina. For the second and third weeks, I was to keep my face down for 1/2 hour every hour. That meant lying on a massage table I’d borrowed, timing the half-hour transitions with a cooking timer. While I can now keep my head up, I'm not able to drive until the bubble dissipates and walking is a challenge with my distorted depth percepti...

This week I learned that I was accepted into the Baer Art Center residency in northern Iceland for the month of July 2016. It's difficult to get into this residency and so I was thrilled to find out that I was one of ten artists accepted: five for June and five for July. It makes me think of all the times I have experienced rejections in my art career. Early on, I found rejections from juried shows devastating and I used to withdraw from artmaking for a bit to have a little sulk. A week or so later, I'd recover and realize I was going to paint anyway. For years, I painted representationally and had sell-out exhibitions every year. Smugly, I figured that I'd always have sell-out shows! But then I experienced growing pains.  My work gradually changed and I experimented in many directions in painting, eventually settling into abstraction. Along the way, I had my first exhibition that sold absolutely nothing. Nothing. Not only nothing at the opening, but nothing for the wh...

Lightworks 1 30x30" Oil on panel ©2015 Janice Mason Steeves I've written before about courage. Many times actually : at times when I have changed directions in my work, when I have felt vulnerable , and when I moved into abstraction in my painting.   Before the two advanced painting workshops I taught this past month, I invited the students t o send me some suggestions for topics they wished me to address in the workshop. Many wrote to say that they wished for some discussion of authenticity and truth. They wondered how to achieve that.   Authenticity takes courage. It takes cour age to show your art, to open yourself to criticism and rejection, to pick yourself up when things aren't going well. Painting t eaches that. Not everyone will like your work. Some will hate it. Others will totally understand it. But opening that way, showing that vulnerability is how you find the truth of who you are. It's saying, "This is who I am."  Brene B...

 Singing the Essence 46    29.5 x 39.5" ©2015 Janice Mason Steeves Sometimes there is another presence at work when we make art. Elizabeth Gilbert in her book, Big Magic , calls it "eudaimonia", a word coined by the  Greeks meaning an external daemon of creativity. All artists feel this at one time or another. Call it the muse, or an angel or a spirit guide or flow. It doesn't happen for me all the time. But that creative presence has definitely visited me. I remember early on in my painting career when I made a painting that was far above my ability at the time. Of course, I painted it, but there was a sense that I couldn't have. I remember the first time it happened. The painting painted itself very quickly and confidently and when I stood back, I was shocked. Something magical had happened! At first my ego puffed up and took full credit. Only trouble was, I couldn't repeat that feat. It took another year or so for me to bring my paintings up to tha...

Delicate Balance 16x16" Oil on paper ©2015 Janice Mason Steeves I've always considered play to be the driving force that leads my work. It takes me into new territory, helps me break boundaries and express myself in different ways. Mindful play is the sort of play that It involves preparing ourselves in an inner way, calming our minds and bringing ourselves into the present moment. It also involves coming to the work with an understanding of structure. It's not thinking about design, it's more that we have incorporated that knowledge and then we let it go. In the same way, we can't pick up a saxophone and become jazz musicians by blowing random notes. Jazz has structure and skill behind it and the musician moves beyond it in order to fly. My current work as in the photo above, began this past winter after an intense year of work in preparation for a major exhibition. After the work was completed, I needed to have a respite and simply play with paint on pap...