In the realm of contemporary painting, few artists capture the ineffable dance of light and atmosphere quite like Keiran Brennan Hinton. His work, rooted in the rigorous practice of observation, bridges the intensely personal and the quietly universal, transforming the mundane into the poetic. Whether rendering the ephemeral glow of a Texas dusk or the quiet intimacy of an interior, Brennan Hinton invites the viewer into a world where stillness hums with life and light becomes a protagonist in its own right.
Hinton is currently at the Corsicana Artists and Writers Residency prepping for a solo show at SOCO Gallery. Through his residency, Hinton reflects on the shifting landscapes of his practice—both physical and emotional. In this interview, he discusses the fleeting beauty of transitional light, the autobiographical intimacy of objects, and the inherent tension between immediacy and slowness in observational painting.
With a poetic sensibility and a painter’s eye for detail, Hinton reveals a process that is as much about noticing and remembering as it is about rendering. In his upcoming show, Lonesome Whistle, he promises to further explore these themes, charting a course through the Texas landscape with works that linger in the spaces between.
PATRON (P): Your work is deeply rooted in observational painting, capturing the ephemeral qualities of light and atmosphere. Do you see this act of looking as an emotional process as much as a technical one?
Keiran Brennan Hinton (KBH): I think a lot about the emotional quality of light, the way a time of day can evoke a feeling and communicate something specific about a place. While I’ve been in Corsicana, Texas, I’ve been struck by the pink hue that falls like a blanket over the town right after the sunsets, which quickly disappears in the wake of soft blues. In Texas, I’m able to see the horizon in a way I’m not used to, coming from Toronto and before that New York. There’s an atmospheric light that guides your eyes toward the distance, getting cooler and cooler.
But while I’m making the paintings, I’m so engaged with the act of observation, trying to keep up with the changing light and shadows as they move across a space or landscape, that I don’t think too much about the emotional component of looking, which only comes later.
P: How does the process of observation shape the emotional register of your paintings?
KBH: I’m trying to get in tune with my surroundings through observational painting, noticing the details that make a painting feel familiar and poignant, even if it’s of something mundane. I’m drawn to two paintings that Edward Hopper made towards the end of his life, Sun in an Empty Room and Room by the Sea. Both paintings hold an emotional resonance and emptiness that signifies the end of his life, as if the light is about to fade away, or the endlessness of the distant horizon, there is a sense of looking beyond. Observational painting can speak to our associations with a time of day. Recently, I’ve been focused on the dusk or dawn light that feels transitional, ephemeral and fleeting.
P: Many of your paintings of interiors feel almost like portraits, imbued with a sense of presence or absence. Do you think of these spaces as autobiographical, or are they more reflective of a universal intimacy?
KBH: They come from a very autobiographical place, with the hopes of having them reflect a universal sense of intimacy. I often think about making figurative paintings without the figures, as if a person is just off stage right or left, just out of sight. To me there’s more intimacy in suggestions, showing these side moments of daily life, hinting at a life outside the frame. They aren’t particularly revealing or don’t often have an overarching narrative, they just are what they are: the items on a bedside table, an empty Topo Chico bottle on a desk next to my glasses, a bouquet of flowers slowly wilting. There is also a sense of privacy in the paintings, describing something so it teeters on the edge of legibility or recognition, secrets that are only obvious to someone close to me, anecdotes of my life.
P: Light in your paintings is almost a character, shifting, transformative, and deeply evocative. How do you decide what kind of light to pursue in a given work?
KBH: Absolutely! I’m drawn to moments at the beginning or end of a day when light envelopes a place, or when you can tell the temperature of the day by the color of the sky or know the thickness of the air by the hue on the horizon. I often think about the early annunciation paintings where light is a character that both sets the tone and atmosphere while also guiding you through a painting and hinting at the viewer what to look at. Light and shadow can also create a sense of time while viewing a painting; you can have a bright area, contrasted with a darker slower space somewhere else, that your eyes have to adjust to. I often paint at night, and I love the idea that our eyes see more the longer you look, which I think can happen in a painting and can exist as a larger metaphor about life.
P: Do you ever find yourself chasing a specific memory of light?
KBH: I’ll often notice a moment of light and stow it away in my memory to return to later on. This weekend I was driving back from San Antonio to Corsicana in the evening and the sky filled with a soft yellow haze as the sun set. I couldn’t pull over to paint at that moment, but I used that recent memory as the starting point for a painting I made this morning. Recently, I’ve been making a large sunrise painting, so I wake up before the sun rises, set up my palette and easel, and then quickly render the sky as the sun comes up. It’s such a fleeting moment that I’ve found the only way to get close to it is to use thin washes of pure color, quinacridone magenta and Indian yellow, before the full spectrum changes. I then use the small sky study as the basis for the larger work. I continued to wake up each morning before sunrise to take notes about the light, which changes day to day. It’s an impossible task trying to describe what you see, but I love the chase of it.
P: Painting from life, especially in the plein air tradition, is a deeply physical and immediate practice. Do you think this approach limits or liberates your creativity?
KBH: I find it to be both liberating and limiting. Painting from life means that anything is on the table to paint as long as you can get in front of it. There’s something exhilarating about finding nuisance in what you’re looking at and practicing attention. But it can also be very limiting, as you have to contend with the elements and obstacles of painting onsite or outdoors, which can include but isn’t limited to rain, heat, snow, bug bits, wind etc. etc.
P: Your works often seem to linger in moments of stillness. How do you balance the slowness of your process with the urgency of capturing something transient, like shifting light or a particular mood?
KBH: I switch between small single-sitting paintings and larger slower works as a way to stay active and attentive to my surroundings and subject matter. Life is never still, but can seem to move very slowly at times, punctuated by moments of excitement and speed, like a storm coming in or noticing a shooting star across the night sky. I want this tension in the paintings, the waning light that’s about to evaporate below the horizon against the immediacy of my surroundings that are within arm’s reach. I’ve been working on a night window painting while in Corsicana, which started as a landscape down the main street of town, I then put a window frame around the landscape to give it a different sense of space. It started pouring rain, so I painted the raindrops as they fell outside and on the glass of the window. There’s no time for thinking in these moments and it’s a fully immersive intensity. Both the slowness and urgency in my paintings originates from a similar situation I’m responding to in real time while painting.
P: Your studio, in a converted schoolhouse, seems like an artwork—a space steeped in history and solitude. How does this environment influence your work?
KBH: I often return to the red brick schoolhouse I have in eastern Ontario as an ongoing project of documenting the same space over a prolonged period of time. When you own a space, you get to know it across seasons. We also continue to work on the house, so the paintings are like personal time capsules and a way for me to remember the history of space as it inevitably changes.
P: The pandemic forced many artists to turn inward, physically and emotionally. Did this period of isolation shift your understanding of your own practice, or of the spaces you choose to depict?
KBH: I had been painting interiors for a while before the pandemic, but I had a similar experience with lots of people I imagine, of looking closely at one’s surroundings, over and over again and trying to find moments of beauty in the everyday. It also made me appreciate the experience of painting outdoors, once I began doing that again.
P: Your work resonates with echoes of artists like Bonnard and Hammershøi who similarly explored the poetry of interiors. Do you see your practice as part of a larger historical conversation, or do you prefer to avoid such comparisons?
KBH: I love Bonnard and Hammershoi, as well as Vuillard, Lois Dodd, Fairfield Porter, Catherine Murphy, and many more. I believe paintings provide a place of intimacy, stillness, and close looking that’s hard to find elsewhere. I would return to a Bonnard at the Yale Art Gallery while I was in grad school, and only after a few months of visiting the painting did I notice the figure in the distance. It felt like such an earned intimacy, that I often think about.
P: Your paintings invite viewers to step into quiet, intimate spaces. Do you think of your work as creating a kind of refuge for your audience, or is it more about sharing a fleeting sense of presence?
KBH: I think it’s a bit about both, and I appreciate you using the word refuge, which I hadn’t thought of before. Because there isn’t a specific narrative in my work and I want them to be very approachable, accessible, and inviting. I do think of them as an impossible pause in time, which could provide a point of reflection or meditation, but also a stimulation of observation that asks your eyes to do some work. To feel yourself looking can be such a rewarding experience—after painting I often feel hyper-alert, like my eyes have gone to the gym, and I hope to pass on some of that feeling to the viewer when they stand in front of my work.
P: Your recent exhibitions have explored increasingly nuanced themes of light and space. Where do you see your work evolving from here? Are there new landscapes, subjects, or techniques you’re eager to explore?
KBH: It’s a hard question to answer, but recently with my time at the Corsicana Artists and Writers Residency in Texas, I’ve been exploring how to paint the world outside my window with the same level of attention as the objects right in front of me. I’ve also been excited about increasing the contrast between hyper-described and observed moments set against looser empty areas of allusion, like Patrick Caulfield or Doron Langberg, as if you were painting both what’s in front of you as well as what’s in the corner of your eye. It’s an attempt to capture the feeling of being embodied. As for the subject matter, I think that will always depend on where I am, but the pursuit of specificity and light is something I don’t think I’ll ever tire of.
P: How do you navigate that interplay between isolation and connection in your practice?
KBH: The spaces in my paintings are often domestic and shared with family, which is always on my mind. I’m interested in meditating on the lived experiences of those closest to me, even while painting alone. I also live with a lot of art, mostly from trades I’ve made with friends or small pieces my wife and I have bought together, and these often show up as quotations in my paintings. Being a painter is always a push and pull between the isolation you feel while making the piece and the connection you hope for when exhibiting it.
P: I understand you are having a show with Dallas Art Fair exhibitor SoCo Gallery. Will you please tell us about it?
KBH: Yes! I’m having a show at SOCO Gallery in January 2025 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The exhibition will be of the small and medium works I’ve been making while in residency in Corsicana and will heavily feature the Texas light as late summer turns to fall and into early winter. I’ve titled the show Lonesome Whistle, which refers to the 1951 Hank Wiliams song about the train whistle in the distance. Throughout the day and night, the trains pass by, and I think of them as being this distance sound between two places, which I’ve slowly gotten used to while being here. Painting from life is an exercise in noticing, pulling things out from the background, and holding onto that space before you forget a detail. The show will be an accumulation of nocturne scenes, interiors, and landscapes, including the oil tanks on the outskirts of Corsicana in the aptly named “Optimistic Park” or the comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) that we saw on my first night in Texas.