Janice Mason Steeves

 My friend, Åsa Boström is a Swedish artist and writer.  She is also coordinating the workshop in Cold Wax and Oil that Rebecca Crowell and I will teach at Ricklundgarden , Saxnas, Sweden in May.  Åsa is collecting stories from artists about their creative process. Here is her recent interview with me: Studio Practice: Can you describe your studio practice? For example when and how you work, what you surround yourself with while working, and how you switch over to studio-mode?   When I go into my studio each morning, I begin the day with a little ritual that sets the space for my creative work.  I wrote a blog post about this last summer. I have a comfortable old chair in a corner. A couple of big stones  and a white pillar candle rest on a small table beside the chair. My morning ritual is to sit in the chair, light my candle and meditate. A wood-burning stove is in one corner, bookshelves filled with art books in another co...

In Part 1 of Helping Artists to Discover Their Personal Voices, I wondered if there was only one voice we could have. I said that so much of discovering your own path, is making choices, and then creating a body of work to explore those choices. In this post, I'd like to write about discovering what you like. Giggles What do you most love to paint?  When my children were younger and trying to decide what to study or what direction to follow, I would always tell them to follow their giggles. When we are on the right track, there is a gut feeling that is very much like giggling. Sort of bubbly. And I advised them to follow that. And they have. It's Joseph Campbell's expression, 'follow your bliss' integrated into a bodily sensation!  What do you want most to paint right now? It helps if you tell yourself that the choice doesn't have to be set in stone for the remainder of your life. It's a choice for now. Follow that choice....

    Whether we know it or not, when we embark on the journey of becoming an artist, we open up. We have to. It’s part of the process. And it’s in that process that we create ourselves. The artist's voice is a mixture of style, technique, and the message they wish to impart. But that can change. It’s not fixed in stone.  Kirkegaard said, “We create ourselves by our choices”. Many years ago I made the choice to become a painter. It was for me, a life-altering decision. It took a long time to make that decision and then more time to call myself an artist. First I chose to work in watercolour, then later, in oils. I chose first of all to paint landscapes and still life, moving much later into dark and mysterious paintings of vessels. Choice. Choice. Choice. I continued to make choices about my subject matter and as I grew as an artist and a person, so my work continued to change.  Eventually I moved into abstraction, where the wor...

Rebecca Crowell and I have written a blog post about our upcoming Abstract Painting with Cold Wax and Oil workshop that we will be co-teaching in the stunningly beautiful region of Lapland, Northern Sweden from May 12-18, 2015. Here's the link.  Please have a read. http://crowellandmasonsteeves.blogspot.ca/2015/02/workshop-in-sweden_9.html

John O'Donohue  the Irish poet and philosopher, once wrote, “One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.”        It is truly a gift.  Last Sunday, Gallery Stratford curator Aidan Ware, introduced my exhibition, Gathering Light with these words:  "The work is not only beautiful aesthetically, it expresses a longing we all feel-perhaps particularly at this time of year-as we search for light and meaning and hope.  Mark Rothko once said, 'A painting is not about an experience. It is an experience.' And I cannot think of a better statement to describe Janice's work. You have to experience it. Meditate with it. Be quiet with it. Let it transcend its form and become a spiritual experience. I believe that art can act as a kind of spiritual salve. It can heal as much as it can provoke us towards and past boundaries. It can offer us space for contemplation, elevation, communion. For gathering light." My exhibiti...

The work at Gallery Stratford awaiting installation I'm enjoying a small pause in my work cycle.  My studio is bare and quiet. My solo exhibition called Gathering Light , will open at the beautiful and spacious Gallery Stratford in Stratford, Ontario  on January 25th.  It runs until April 7th.  Over the Christmas holidays I was busy with the details of preparing the work to be sent off: sanding edges, attaching hanging hooks, documenting, cataloguing and wrapping the work.  Twenty-seven paintings were sent off on Monday. Gathering Light 25 (1455)  60x60"  Oil on Canvas ©2014 Janice Mason Steeves I've worked for months on this exhibition, flowing on a stream of high energy that carried me along and at times exhausted me.  It's exciting this business of art.  We put ourselves in the path of the Gods so they will carry us along.  And if we do this consistently we find a deep in...

Gathering Light 28A   60x60"   Oil on canvas  ©2014 Janice Mason Steeves In my work this past year, I have been focusing on light, preparing for my exhibition in January at Gallery Stratford, in Stratford, Ontario.  I write this on the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year.   Ancient people knew about light.   They spent hundreds of years building stone circles and passage graves, orienting them to the sunlight or moonlight at solstices and equinoxes. Light was sacred to them.   Inner light and the oneness of the world were ideas sacred to the monks on Iona.  Besides spending time this past fall visiting a passage grave in Ireland, and walking the ancient stone circle of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, I attended a retreat on the island of Iona in Scotland. It was here that Celtic Christianity was brought into Europe.  I decided to metaphorically gather some of that light--from Iona and from the passage graves and st...