Janice Mason Steeves

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...

I had intended a much more intellectual post today.  Oh well. This is what came out instead. At Christmas I gave my young grandkids a gift certificate to be traded in for a night at a hotel with their Grammie.  Saturday was the day that they cashed them in. We had enough stuff packed to stay a week, including bathing suits,  swim goggles, swim noodles, a beach ball, and an enormous bag of snacks-not all of which their mother would have approved. I had come off a week where my work was not going where I'd hoped. It was one of those weeks where I thought I might ditch it all and apply for a job at Tim Horton's coffee shop where I'd wear a baseball cap at work and serve double doubles. I won't go into it here.  Suffice it to say, I really needed a break. Three weeks ago I did a silent retreat at Loyola House, the Jesuit Centre in Guelph, Ontario.  While it was an extraordinarily nourishing experience in many ways, I realize now that I spent a lot of...

Fragile 5     29x29"  Oil/cold wax on panel © 2014 Janice Mason Steeves This early morning, I'm sitting in front of my wood stove that has been burning non-stop this winter, as I look out onto a fresh blanket of snow in the woods behind my house.  More snow is swirling through the branches and there's the promise of more to come. It brings a profound silence that sound-absorbent layer of snow. I'm thinking about the power of silence and the Silent Retreat I did last weekend at Loyola House , the Jesuit Centre in Guelph, Ontario.  There were nearly 50 others in the retreat.  We had pleasantly cozy single rooms with carpeted floors, a desk,   a sink and a big comfortable chair.  We didn't speak at all for the weekend, not in hallways, by the fireplace in the lounge or at meals.  Having the limitation of silence made time expand. The retreat centre holds a sense of the sacred, and there is something deeply profound about sharin...

Rebecca Crowell and me at my exhibition at the Burlington Art Centre, December 2013 This blog is another in the series of co-blogs between myself and Rebecca Crowell. We are good friends who often discuss issues about art and painting in our private correspondence. In the hopes that sharing some of these thoughts would interest and engage others,  the idea of a co-blog was born. To read our first co-blog, which we posted almost exactly one year ago, please click here . Rebecca : You and I have had a few emails back and forth lately about the need to develop a "thick skin" as artists in order to deal with some of the difficult things that come our way. It's funny, I can recall in detail quite a few negative things that have been said or written about my work, but if you asked me to remember even a few of the (far more common) positive remarks I've received, I'd be quite a bit more vague. Recalling negative experiences more easily than positive...

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 ...

Yellow 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves White 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Orange 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Blue 60x72"  Oil/cold wax on canvas © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves Installation shot at the Burlington Art Centre My exhibition, In Search of Balance at the Burlington Art Centre in Burlington, Ontario, opened on Sunday, November 24th. In preparation, I needed to have some discussions about my work with the curator, Denis Longchamps, and to rewrite my artist's statement.  An exhibition in a public gallery is such a gift. Not only is it hung so beautifully, but the conversations with the curator and the preparation time, allow an opening into deeper consideration of the work and the long journey that led here.  I've taken the time in preparation, to think about where my work has come from, what truly is important to me, and how I a...

Green 5'x 6' oil/cold wax on canvas  ©2013 Janice Mason Steeves I'm preparing for an exhibition in November, at the  Burlington Art Centre  in Burlington, ON, a beautiful public gallery located on the western end of Lake Ontario. As is so often the case with art, if you can allow the process to unfold and trust that it will, amazing things can happen.  I believe that art is it's own spiritual journey. The paintings in this series have led me on such a journey. Last spring, Denis Longchamps, the Director of Programs, asked to come to my studio to see how the work was progressing. I had an idea for the show and had begun work on it. I had been working on a series of paintings I called Lines of Desire.  This series was an inner journey, where I was exploring my feelings related to the sudden life-threatening illness of a close friend. Denis liked the direction I was going and suggested we meet sometime in September to select work for the sh...