Isolating creativity

Mark Brennan remembers the first landscape he painted. It was the early 1990s, and he had taken a cheap, rustic canoe up to Perch Lake in Trafalgar. Out there, it was quiet, serene and peaceful and that's what he liked about it.
Brennan is a self-taught landscape artist. Self-taught, he says, because he didn't want to be influenced by other artists. "I wanted to develop my own style," explains Brennan, a Whitehill resident.
He prefers to work out on location with nothing but a camera, his canvas and watercolours. He travels the country to paint landscapes - he's been everywhere from Cape Breton Highlands National Park to Algonquin Park in Ontario and Banff National Park, Canada's oldest national park.
"The only places in Canada I haven't painted are the arctic and the Prairies but I hope to soon," he says.
He likes to paint in remote places. The more alone he feels, the better. His favourite place to paint was Malign Lake at Jasper National Park.
"You have this feeling of vulnerability there," he says of its appeal. "You're stripped bare of your comforts."
Brennan began painting landscapes as a way to combine his love of the arts with his love of nature. When he was 16 he joined the navy and became a ship's photographer. He figures that's when he first learned to express himself creatively. After moving from his native Scotland to Pictou County, he began looking for new forms of artistic expression. Painting seemed like a natural transition, he says. The chance to bond with nature is what keeps him coming back, he says.
"I really feel as people we are missing our bonds with nature. We're living well beyond our needs," he says. "My goal as an artist is to rekindle that bond."
Painting landscapes is an adventure, he says. He points to a painting he made while visiting Yoho National Park in British Columbia. "The colour of the water out there is incredible," he says. He remembers being there and hearing this roar as the glaciers moved; it was a roar so loud at first he mistook it for thunder.
At Hector Lake in Banff National Park - he was there in May but the lake was still frozen - his biggest challenge was creating a sense of depth between the mountains and the dark, almost blackish-blue lake. As an artist, Brennan says he has a licence to change minor details, from the colour of the sky to the location of the trees.
"Art is everywhere," he says. "It's all in the eye."
Painting is currently a part-time job for Brennan, but he says his goal is to do it full-time. His paintings can be found in galleries throughout Nova Scotia, at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Sales and Rental in Halifax and Lyghtsome Gallery in Antigonish, as well as Calrus Gallery in Toronto. Brennan says he's trying to expand his business through word-of-mouth with a little help from the Internet. Currently, his website, www.markbrennanfineart.ca, pops up in a Google search of "Canadian landscape artists."
He has also recently completed a video that can also be found on the video-sharing website Youtube. Thanks to time lapse technology, the video depicts him creating a small oil painting of the northern shore of Prince Edward Island in mere minutes. Brennan hopes by uploading short films of his work, it will help provide insight into the life of a landscape artist. The Internet, says Brennan, has helped him introduce his paintings to a wider audience not only across Canada but around the world.

Artisans is a twice monthly feature on the creative side of Pictou County.