Keiran Brennan Hinton @ SBG Pop-Up

Over the past summer Keiran Brennan Hinton has painted an intimate suite of paintings reflecting his surrounding environment.  For the past 5 years Brennan Hinton was living in NYC after completing his MFA at the Yale School of Art.  In March 2020 he moved back to Canada because of the Pandemic and is now living in a renovated old school house in rural Ontario.  The simple interiors and lush landscape surrounding the property have become the focus of this new suite of paintings.

Brennan Hinton is interested in focusing on daily activities that are normally overlooked – hanging out laundry on a wash line, making a bed, or picking wildflowers.  The paintings featured in our Art Toronto booth are meditations on a new way of living both inside and out during the Pandemic and reflect his interest in touch and the act of looking in relationship to painting.

Keiran Brennan Hinton Statement:

There’s a common misconception that equates the every day with the mundane. John Keats disproves this in his poem To Autumn, unpacking the season with prose that verges on gluttony. He cycles through the five senses: fragrances and tastes and colour, the cadence of the poem itself a chorus. There’s nothing mundane about a season when you’re standing still and looking.

I’m drawn to what I see when I stand still. This series of paintings began in June after moving back from New York to a rural property in Eastern Ontario. Just as Keats observed his surroundings to find inspiration for lines such as:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

and

While barred clouds boom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

I search for a way to capture the warmth of light on leaves, the loneliness of a wood stove at night, the reflection of the interior in a window, the relentless movement of nature outside it. Keats coupled formal techniques with raw sensation, similarly, my paintings are informed by formal applications and art history as a way to communicate feeling and memory.

This series of works is about a reorientation of attention towards what is nearby and within arms reach, how that begins to reflect a personal interiority. Simply put, painting from observation is a way to record time, temperature, and touch. It is a practice in patience and concentration which requires a willingness to be surprised—to pay attention to the seasons.

Keiran Brennan Hinton 2020

Keiran Brennan Hinton was born in 1992 in Toronto, ON.  He graduated from Pratt Institute in 2014 with a BFA in Painting and completed his MFA in Painting / Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 2016.   Since 2016, he has maintained a steady studio practice in New York City.

An RBC Painting Competition finalist in 2018, Hinton will be included in an upcoming 2021 group exhibition I am Here, Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Solo exhibitions have most recently included, Una Finestra sul Cortile / Rear Window at Francesco Pantaleone Gallery in Palermo, Close at Hand at 1969 Gallery in New York, Matter of Fact, at Mulherin Toronto.

Hinton has attended the James Castle House Residency in Boise, ID, the Macedonia Institute in Chatham NY and has been awarded the Gloucester Painting Prize and Residency, Yale International Student Scholarship, Outstanding Merit in Painting from Pratt Institute and a Presidential Scholarship from Pratt Institute.  The artist currently lives north of Kingston, ON.

Link to Keiran Brennan Hinton’s Artist Page HERE