Q&A with American designer Corey Damen Jenkins
Young Canadian artist Keiran Brennan Hinton is hitting his stride.
THE ARTIST: Keiran Brennan Hinton is a Toronto-born, New York–based artist who explores intimate moments through paint. Often working in a small scale, his paintings are like portraits, minus the sitter. Focusing on interior and exterior scenes that have a connection to Keiran, these paintings feel journalistic, or as though the viewer is reading his diary.
THE WORKS: I’ve written before about the resurgence of figurative art, and 2020 seemed to be defined by this — in both portraiture and still life paintings of interiors. I think this stems from a desire to connect and depict something of personal meaning. Keiran’s work beautifully portrays this trend; he creates narrative scenes that invite the viewer to linger and experience an intimate moment in the lives of the people who inhabit Keiran’s spaces. “For me, it’s about slowing down and becoming conscious of what’s in front of me,” says Keiran. “Painting from life helps me feel connected to myself, and I hope for that sense of connection and care to extend to the viewer. It’s about making an image that wants to be looked at slowly.”
Working from Home is a wonderful example of this. The small-scale painting forces the viewer to get up close. At first, you see the light streaming in from the large windows, then more details that show a work from home setup — a small space with a dining table doubling as a desk. It’s only on closer inspection that you notice the foot dangling below the table and the fingers poised above the laptop — all of a sudden, this painting becomes more personal. Who is this person? How do they know the artist? The collective atmosphere in these works allows people to identify with what is being depicted, so they become personal — not just to the artist — but to the viewer as well.
There’s also an urgency to his work, in that Keiran paints a piece in one sitting in order to capture the moment. “I’ve found that I have to make these paintings all at once, to hold on to the freshness of a fleeting moment,” he says. “Making a painting within these parameters takes the pressure off the individual image. Some days are better than
others, and it’s the same with paintings — you can never go back to yesterday.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, Keiran returned to Toronto. One of his latest series depicts the night sky, and he uses it as a way of differentiating one day from the next, and day from night. The continuous, repetitive, isolated life we’re all leading was something he actively wanted to remember. This series of paintings proved a useful way into this. Each night, he would paint the sky as he saw it from his balcony. April, 11 shows the stillness of a place that’s normally active day and night. Again, the small canvas size proves to be impactful, as only a tiny slice of the city and the night is on view. The location remains obscured, allowing this to remain a private moment and memory. To Keiran, the view would be so entirely specific, having looked out that window and experienced the day and night on that balcony so many times, that he would instantly recognize the setting. However, for the viewer, the shared experience is drawn from recognizing the solitude of night and finding the beauty from our homes. COLLECTING: Keiran has exhibited widely and consistently for the past seven years. He was the first participant in the James Castle House Residency in Boise, Idaho, he’s been a finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and he completed his MFA at Yale University, which is considered one of the best MFA programs in North America. His canvases start at $1,900.