Janice Mason Steeves

Wine with Everything 24x24"  oil/cold wax on panel  ©Janice Mason Steeves 2011   Each year for the past two years, I've organized a home retreat for myself. Alyson Stanfield of artbizcoach.com , interviewed me a couple of weeks ago, for her online group called The Artist's Conspiracy about my home retreats.  She was interested in how I go about planning them, and what I get out of them. Even though I live in the country, I still get caught up in the busyness of life; spending too much time on the computer; doing the business part of my art; keeping up with friends; spending time with family; doing volunteer jobs, appointments. The regular demands of life. I used to have a cottage that had no hydro, and no phone, where I'd spend a week or two at a time by myself painting and writing poetry.  I found this to be an extremely creative time.  I decided to create that same retreat space at home.  I prepare for it as though I am going on a va...

Last week I gave a cold wax and oil workshop in Winnipeg to these artists.  All of them have been painting in acrylic for many years, so cold wax and oil was a big departure for them. And even though I suggested that they make 'bad art' in one exercise during this class, there were some really exciting paintings that came out of the workshop. I've probably written about making 'bad art' before.  The idea was mentioned in the book, the Tao of Photography , as well as  in Eric Maisel's book, "Coaching the Artist Within ": "To create we have to take the bad with the good.  We're bound to write bad paragraphs along with good ones.  That's the eternal law.  We can get rid of those bad paragraphs later on, but first we must write them.  Otherwise we won't write anything at all.  If we try to write only the good paragraphs, we are three-quarters of the way toward paralysis.  The name that we've coined for this problem is 'perfect...

Cicada 42x42" oil on panel  ©Janice Mason Steeves 2011 The southern Ontario City of Woodstock received a $3.3 million dollar grant last year to renovate and expand their art gallery to four times the space with the ability to house world class exhibitions. With construction nearing completion, this  past week, recently elected Mayor Pat Sobeski dealt the city and the arts a huge blow. In a last minute decision City Council decided to offer the space instead to a local college and leave the art gallery in the small cramped space they have occupied for the past twenty-eight years.  In a rally last weekend, a huge group of arts supporters turned out to protest this move, waving signs that said: "ART IS FOR EVERYONE" . The mayor is now reconsidering his decision and may propose that the college and the art gallery share the space.  This is a less than perfect decision for the art gallery but still affords them twice the space they had previously. Just before ...

I Had a Sweater This Colour ©Janice Mason Steeves 2011        My work of the past year has been one of going into the studio with no preconceived idea of what I will do.  I enter in a spirit of play  I am balancing the technical skills I have learned over many years as an artist in one hand, with the idea of knowing nothing in the other. "The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing ." This quotation, attributed to Hemingway, (or was it Henry Miller?) is about this balancing point of knowing it all and knowing nothing.  In the  excellent book, The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharpe , she says, "You cannot manufacture inexperience, but you can maintain it." "In it's purest form, inexperience erases fear.  You do not know what is and is not possible and therefore everything is possible". There is a surrender to the process, a giving up of control to the dialogu...

I taught a Cold Wax and Oil Painting workshop this past weekend with a group of women who were likely all over sixty years of age.  By the time we get into our 60's we bring  a rich life experience to our work: most have been married once or maybe 4 times, have grown children and now grandchildren,  had long and successful careers in business or education or medicine, cared for ailing parents when they were dying.  They bring the wealth of years of learning and life to their art and to this workshop. One thing about getting older I find is that there is a clear awareness that time is limited.  I could tell myself when I was 50 that I was only half way through my life.  But not now! Barbara, one of the women in the workshop, worried that at this age, she was too old to change her subject matter in her painting.  My own feeling is, why not spend that time doing exactly what I want to do?  Why not change? Let my work lead me to new worlds, new wa...

Rebecca Crowell and me in my studio in front of one of my new paintings. For the past three days I've had my friend Rebecca Crowell and her husband, Don Ticknor, visiting me from Wisconsin. I met Rebecca last March when I was taking a cold wax workshop from her near Madison Wisconsin.  I introduced her to Gallery 133 in Toronto which is one of the galleries where I show my work.  The gallery invited her to bring some of her work up to Toronto, which prompted this visit. Besides talking continuously about our work and our teaching, and discovering that we have the same sense of hilarity, we spent two days visiting galleries in Toronto, especially in the Distillery District and Yorkville.  I especially liked the work of Maya Bar and Ram Samocha at Julie M. Gallery, Ed Bartram's Rockscapes and a Stu Oxley monoprint at Mira Godard Gallery , Leonard Cohen's drawings at Drabinsky Gallery and Zhang He's deliciously thick oil paintings at Odon Wagner Gallery .

#1101 30x30" cold wax/oil on panel  © 2011 Janice Mason Steeves This is my first painting of 2011.  The influence of Spain and my artist residency at Can Serrat seems to be appearing in my work unexpectedly.  Playing with colour so freely during the residency was inspirational and combined with my interest in layered, weathered and decaying surfaces, I'm heading toward a new body of work. This non-objective work requires that I completely surrender to the process, not knowing from moment to moment where the work will take me.  It rides on the back of many years of painting but demands letting all of that go.  It is a demanding force, like "duende" .  Angeles Arrien in her book, "The Second Half of Life" , says that the 'igniting power of fire that comes from the depths of the human spirit, is known cross-culturally by different names: as duende in Spain's flamenco; verissimo in Italian opera; fado in Portugal; tango in Argentina; sanda...