Janice Mason Steeves is a visual artist who lives on 15 acres west of Toronto, Ontario in Canada. The luminous, serene nature of her paintings caught my eye. Her inspiration from nature, and wild places caught my interest. She works in oil and cold wax.

 HW: Can you briefly discuss your childhood/formative years as they relate to your development as a creative adult?

JMS: I grew up at the edge of town in a large prairie city in central Canada. My brothers and I were given lots of freedom to roam where we wanted as long as we were home for meals. I had no exposure to the creative arts as a child except for what we learned in school but I’d say that my creativity developed through using my imagination as I played in nature.

I had no interest in studying art when I went to university. I wanted to learn about, understand and help people. I attended the University of Manitoba, eventually earning an MA in Clinical Psychology.  

By 1984, I was working part time in school Psychology and had two young children. A friend suggested that we take a night school class in watercolour at a local college. It was a major life-altering experience for me. The watercolour instructor opened a door into a world of creativity and wonder and I skipped through. I never stopped painting from that day onward. 

In 1986, I applied to study Art Therapy, thinking to combine my skills and interests. I applied for a leave of absence from my work in psychology, and negotiated a revised Art Therapy program using my existing credentials. Just 2 months before I was to begin the program, the school informed me of  massive changes to their program. I was very frustrated and angry that all the changes made it impossible for me to take the program. I had to drop out. When I gathered myself together, I decided to take my leave of absence anyway and see if I had the discipline to work at painting on my own. I never went back to psychology.

Over time, I took many art workshops and eventually went to art school as a full time student. I loved going to art school in my 40s. I sat at the front of each class, wide awake and full of questions during slide shows, unlike the young students dozing off behind me. Graduating from art school gave me a huge boost of confidence and solidified my commitment to an art career.

HW: What personal qualities do you think you have that have helped you achieve your creative goals? 

JMS: Curiosity, a love of learning,  perseverance and an appreciation of awe in the world.

HW: What have been your biggest creative challenges and how did you deal with them?

JMS: Making art, every painting is a creative challenge. That’s one of the things I love so much about making art. And when the wind is blowing from the right direction and the stars are in certain positions in the sky, it’s possible to make a deep soul connection to your creativity. A window opens. Your painting simply flows. It doesn’t happen all the time. But when it does, you remember.

HW: What have been the biggest rewards?

JMS: The surprise of the journey; that by following my bliss (as Joseph Campbell would say), I would have such a full and joyous life.

HW: Did you have a mentor? If so, who was it and what did they provide you? 

JMS: I didn’t have a mentor in the traditional sense. There was a much older and well-known Canadian landscape painter named Doris McCarthy who inspired me and who I was lucky enough to travel with. We travelled to the high Arctic in January before the light came back, to  paint and to experience the cold and the dark.  Doris’ dedication and drive certainly inspired me. I feel grateful though to have mentors in the broader sense of the word, from my children who  encourage me and offer welcome advice, and the support of friends, students, and collectors. Because I didn’t have a mentor in the traditional sense, I developed an Art Mentoring program where I offer advice to guide individual artists, helping them move their work forward.  

HW: What advice would you give young artists/creatives?

JMS: Make a dedicated studio space in your home if possible, even if you can only find a corner of the basement. 

Make a studio schedule for yourself, working at least 2-3 mornings a week

Don’t show your work to others too early, whether early in your art career or early in the development of a particular painting. Their words, whether positive or negative can change the direction of your work in the fragile beginnings of your painting career.

Learn to trust your own judgment. Trust the big ideas that come to you and act on them.

The very most important thing is to love what you do.

HW: Your work is very connected to nature and remote locations. Please describe routines, exercises or practices that influence your creative process.

JMS: As my painting developed, I realized the importance of place in my work, influenced especially by travel. I took artist residencies in various countries. This is an inexpensive way to travel, meet other artists and have dedicated time to work on projects. I was awarded artist residencies in Spain, Sweden, 2 in Ireland and in Iceland.

About 10 years ago, I moved into abstraction to better express myself. As the artist Sean Scully writes: “The depiction of the real world somehow obstructs access to the spiritual domain. And it is that domain I am trying to gain access to with my paintings.  That’s what I’m always trying to address.  And that’s why I paint abstractly.”

My art sales dropped dramatically at first which led me to teach painting workshops.  I loved teaching. I’ve taught cold wax and oil painting in Canada, the US, Sweden, and Iceland. The majority of my students are older women who, like me, started out to become artists late in life, after raising children and/or pursuing another career. I’m writing a book about this phenomenon as the baby boom generation ages. I’ve interviewed 140 older artists for this project.

While visiting an artist in New Mexico, I came up with the idea of teaching a workshop that would combine nature connection exercises to inspire abstract paintings. I came back home fired up with the idea of teaching painting workshops in remote places where artists could connect more deeply with nature. I found a castle on 2000 oceanside acres in Scotland and a remote outpost in Mongolia. I floated the idea of these travel workshops in a blog post and was overwhelmed with the positive response.  I hooked up with a travel agency and Workshops in Wild Places was born! 

Besides teaching artists how to create strong paintings, my goal in these workshops is inspiring artists to create a new response to the environmental crisis that goes beyond facts, pessimism, arguments, and blame, and instead offers up what nature means to our spirits; the love of it. I search for small, remote inns with easy access to the land for my workshops. In the workshops, I suggest outdoor exercises so the artist has a greater awareness of nature, a deeper connection through mindful walking, awareness and listening exercises, acknowledging that the earth is alive. My intention is to help artists create an intimate relationship with nature and then to use this relationship as a point of reference for creativity. 

Of course, an artist must create paintings from their own connection to the land, from their own experience. I can only offer suggestions for the direction of their work. To assist, I give students a 3-page handout which asks questions to help direct their focus. I ask questions about visual ideas: observe what calls you, what is predominant for you in the landscape, where does your eye go, what are the colours of the landscape; physical ideas: collect some objects from the environment that might have meaning for you, record the weather; sensing ideas through mindfulness: how do you feel in this environment, feel the energy of the place (the genius loci), what can you smell; in the studio: what do you want to express:  the silence, the calm? How can you express those feelings? Then I invite them to freely play on small sheets of paper in order to develop those ideas and I discuss the importance of composition for their larger pieces.

I have an abundance of really exciting ideas for when we’re able to travel again.

I am offering a workshop to St. Ives in Cornwall in late September 2021, where we’ll meet up with a local artist who gathers earth pigments and makes paint out of them. We’ll collect some of our own pigments and learn to make paint from them. This will be followed by a 5-day painting workshop. We’ll stay and work in a beautiful hotel on the beach in the small historic village of St. Ives, known for the quality of its light. There are 5 spots available.

In early October we’ll travel to a small historic stone village on the Camino in northern Spain. We’ll stay in a retreat centre in the village of Castrillo de los Polvazares with out trips to visit petroglyphs in a remote valley, and a tour of a small cave on the Mediterranean that houses neolithic wall paintings. At the retreat centre, we’ll have 5 full days of painting from the inspiration. There are 3 or 4 spots open on this trip.

In November, I will teach in Morocco. We’ll meet in Marrakech and tour the city for 2 days and then head inland on the ancient caravan route to the village of Ait Ben Haddou, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Staying in a small riad, with our studio nearby, we’ll make out trips to an oasis and visit to a Kasbah. This trip may have one place available.

Other ideas in the works for 2022 include a mountain retreat in western Crete; an inn in a former lighthouse keeper’s house on Quirpon island on the north tip of Newfoundland along Iceberg Alley; and a joint workshop with a creative writing teacher in the Burren in Ireland, and farther out, into 2023, a workshop at a renovated former monastery in Umbria, Italy.

While Workshops in Wild Places can’t travel right now, we can deepen our relationship with the natural world where we live. I offer a Zoom workshop/retreat, to explore our wild selves in relation to the beauty and mystery of the world around us. Artists will create abstract paintings and receive feedback on their work. The workshop will take place in the artist’s studio and in a place in nature near their home. A creative writing instructor will discuss climate change and suggest a creative writing exercise.  While Zoom seems to be a distant sort of format, I’ve found that the artists develop a deep bond in the group and with the earth.

For travel workshops in 2021, go to Workshops in Wild Places:  workshopsinwildplaces.com

For zoom interactive workshops: Janice Mason Steeves website:  janicemasonsteeves.com

To learn more about my upcoming travel and online workshops, please sign up for my mailing list when you visit one of my websites.

Wishing you a holiday filled with spectacular beauty and awe.

“Knowledge is that fascinating resource: you can give it away and you still have it!”

Carl lives in Tucson, Arizona. We met in his home office. Carl’s professional focus was the interface of creativity and machines, designing some of the early software that changed how humans interact with computers.

HW: You describe yourself as a “Digital Impresario”. Can you tell me more about your background, education, training, etc.?

CP:  I grew up in a little town: 1,200 people in rural Ohio. My father was the chief engineer of the local radio station. That was the biggest influence on my growing up, with interesting insights about life. He put responsibility on my shoulders at a very early age. He said, “You’re a smart kid, you are responsible for yourself.” And he left it at that.

In college at Ohio State I just wanted to be educated and took all sorts of things: Political Science, every art history course offered. French and German literature…and I took a Computer Science course. One of the few schools with a Computer Science Department, in 1969. Big computers with punch cards. Super nerdy. I kept going. I liked it.

I was introduced to another grad student named Mike Allen, who was trying to see if computers could be used to teach. I helped with the analysis. Some of our best projects were in Biology, Genetics, German Language, Psychology, Landscape Architecture, Philosophy. I was interested in how people who weren’t computer people might interface with these things. 

I saw: Here’s the machine, and over here is the person with the problem they want to solve. I wanted to move beyond programming to telling the machine to do things. Why can’t we move that closer to the human?

We went around the country, talking to people. The chemist who tried to teach students how to use a distillation laboratory by building a simulation. Someone else did a game for children, some math problems. There weren’t too many things that were very exemplary. 

We studied: How do creative people work?

I had friends who were architects and I watched them work. The fascinating thing was they didn’t approach this by writing down their design document. Say they had a client wanting a house who was really into cooking. The architect would get out their “medium”-a piece of paper and a pencil- and immediately start to sketch. Get a lot of detail in the kitchen, without even knowing how many bedrooms there were going to be. They immediately got into their “medium”.

We went to a choreographer to study dance. They didn’t write down their ideas-the dancer got up and tried to move; a painter would start to put paint on a painting-then paint over it or rub it.

So the interesting thing we found was that creative people tended to start without knowing all the details of where they were going to end up. And they start by getting into their “medium”.

We went back to develop a way for people to tell the computer what to do. So you think about your problem, not translating it to something the computer understands. Leaving much more mental energy to solve your problem!

We went off on our own in 1984. The Macintosh computer had just come out, we bought the first one in the state of Minnesota. Mike and I built a company to do this. I made some “drop dead” dates, if we didn’t have money by this date we’d have to stop. We didn’t make them, but we didn’t go broke, but damn near did!

We found a way to make a handful of symbols or icons, a graphics interface, that you could arrange, and you couldn’t arrange them in a way that didn’t work. When you did that you had a toolbox. You could draw, make images, move it around wherever you want. You are working in a medium. 

If you want to animate something you have an image on the screen and you run through animation, run the program and you just click, click, click and draw a path. Specify a time. Should it repeat? If you want to change it, there ‘s the animation path, you change it, delete it, whatever!

That was called “Authorware”, aimed at education and training. It was built to be interactive. We started to make it possible to do these things. We merged with an animation company out of Chicago and made a company: MacroMedia. A few years ago it was purchased by Adobe. MacroMedia was my format. Adobe purchased MacroMedia-it was a big purchase for them.

It was crazy: small town kid does ok! I stuck with it and it was totally fascinating to me. In the late ‘80’s I would go to conferences and people were using some of these tools you had made! 

HW: What were the biggest professional challenges, and how did you deal with them? 

CP: It was a tremendously hard and fun world to be in. There were maybe 50 people in the technology world making things happen. And you would talk to each other. You were competing, but not really. So it was a very different world, and I got to play in that world.

We presented our ideas in ’84-85, to every group that had money in Minneapolis, to try to get them to fund us. Asking for money. All these Venture firms. They would love it, but at the end they would say,  “But we don’t invest in Software companies”.

So we would leave, go home and try to work on our ideas. We had to solve this problem. You become your own cheerleader. You have to figure out how to get in there. I believe it is kind of believing in yourself, not stupidly, but realistically: Do you understand the problem you are trying to solve, and do you have some smart ways to try to tackle that? Realistically evaluating your skills, your value, and your potential, and then cheering yourself on. Because no one will do it for you. 

It took about 4-5 years. And that is really an important part: not to fool yourself, but to believe in the real strengths you have. And to try to always find new skills, and new things. 

HW: What personal qualities have helped you achieve your goals?

CP: I can work hard, and for a long time, on something. When you try to make big steps it takes a long time. It’s harder than you thought it would be. So there is always a point where you say, “Oh Shit, is this the right direction?” You might steer in a new direction, but you can keep your eye down and look forward to see something. I’m not bothered by that.  

I like to be able to go deep into things. I’ll get the problem in my head and that takes awhile, and once you get there then you can start to work. Solving really hard problems, you have to do the work. 

And I love those times; time disappears. I think that is one of the joys! To be able to really focus on things… You start to see constraints, see how something impacts, and affects, something else. You very quickly can see when some new thing pops up here, how that impacts and changes the overall.

It’s hard. It’s really hard! But it’s that that can drive some success in a project.

HW: What advice would you give young creative people?

CP: Part of my concern in technology: these things are really, really hard. I don’t know if anybody really understands these things we’ve built because they have only worked on a tiny piece of it. They don’t really understand the whole, and how things fit, and how they evolve. Sometimes the way things need to evolve is that whenever you want to add something new, you can’t just add it on without thinking of the whole picture. Try to come up with a way that might be even simpler than you had. And that is hard work. But I think that is the way you make real progress. 

One of the best things about trying something new is the learning process that stretches us as we grow. When I started this website and blog the process was entirely new to me.

This week I am looking behind the scenes to understand some of the hidden functions of running a website and blog. I expected my Subscribers (thank you so much for your support!) were receiving notice of my blog posts. However, that was not the case. So I am learning different ways to post my material, which in turn is teaching me more about how websites function.

We never know what new experiences will teach us, but the journey remains a big part of the adventure!

Also, I have been planting in my garden on these cooler Tucson mornings!