En Plein Air: Steven Brunelle, John Hartman, Mara Korkola, Linda Martinello, Charles Meanwell, and Li Shan

En Plein Air features artists who work in the tradition of en plein air painting, immersing themselves within the landscape as a fundamental part of their process. Through their respective approaches, they are able to communicate the essence of a particular landscape with colour, light and gesture.

Steven Brunelle was born in Toronto in 1964 and currently lives in Lafontaine, Ontario. He is a descendant of  the Drummond Island Metis on his father’s side, while his mother is from the Kitigan Zibi First Nation. Throughout his childhood, his mother dedicated herself to learning the traditional crafts of quill work, moose hair tufting, and beading design. These practices influence Brunelle’s paintings, which demonstrate a fascinating balance between narrative and visual intensity. In his practice, Brunelle interprets the figures of Indigenous oral tradition and recasts them in vivid colour, bringing their stories and lessons into the present day.

John Hartman is one of Canada’s preeminent painters. He is known for his rich, vibrant depictions of the country’s most iconic landscapes. Hartman’s prolific practice includes oil painting, watercolour, pastel, and printmaking. Hartman notes that his aerial viewpoints originate from his childhood dreams of flying; imagining the landscape unfurling like a roll of film below him. A recurrent setting in John Hartman’s practice has been the blue waters of Georgian Bay: “the Bay is my home landscape. It defines my sense of space, light and scale.” In his large-scale works, Hartman dedicates attention to the minutest of details, from people on the ground to boats flitting through massive expanses of blue water.  It is in this desire to intertwine people and place where Hartman deviates from the tradition of Canadian landscape painting, a subject that he is deeply knowledgeable about. He is an aficionado on the work of David Milne and his invention of the colour drypoint etching, a medium which Hartman is now highly regarded for as well.

Toronto-based painter Mara Korkola is known for her captivating works that telescope entire vistas into compact frames. She frequently escapes her urban surroundings to hike and canoe in the wilderness, an innate attraction from her time spent growing up on the North Shore of Lake Superior. She often pairs paintings into diptych and triptych combinations, presenting slightly different views of the same location: a cottage bunkie at night, a misty bay at dusk, or a road lit only by moonlight. Like keyholes, her paintings draw us in and transport us into another time and space.

Linda Martinello’s paintings translate the essence of place with sheared swaths of drafting film and vibrantly-hued paint. Martinello’s practice is largely travel-based, often spending months in foreign places making observational drawings, notes and videos. She then revisits these gathered materials back at her studio to create studies that are followed by larger works that weave together elements of painting, drawing and collage. While her expressive drawing loosely follows the curves of architectural and geographical details, her use of vivid colour evokes the feeling and qualities of light. The resulting works convey a visual language that resonates with the energy of the natural world.

Charles Meanwell has painted his surroundings for the last 40 years in a style that is characterized by gestural brushwork expressed with minimal means. His immediate style is reminiscent of the work of David Milne, Milton Avery, and Barker Fairley, the latter being an important mentor to Meanwell. In addition to painting his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, Meanwell has completed several site specific projects situated in Newfoundland, Georgian Bay and the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Early in her career, Li Shan was a prominent member of the No Name Art Group, an avant-garde art collective, working in China in the 1970s. As China faced severe socio-economic strife and the suppression of many forms of culture, the No Name Art Group emerged as the first art collective in Chinese contemporary art. A self-taught artist, Li Shan's practice is focused on everyday scenes, often revisiting subjects of courtyards, pagodas, city streets, country roads, and architecture. Li Shan is a passionate traveller and avid snowboarder. Based in Beijing, she has recently spent time in Norway, Scotland, and Canada, poetically combining many different artistic influences with freedom and intuition. The charm with which she depicts her idyllic landscapes allows viewers to imagine the artist directly in front of her subjects, bringing an immediacy to her work echoed by the use of oil sticks which allow us to trace the movements of her hand on paper.