Keiran Brennan Hinton: Change of Scenery

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Change of Scenery, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Canadian artist Keiran Brennan Hinton. The exhibition marks the painter’s third solo show with the gallery. It is the culmination of a year’s worth of travel across the U.S., as Brennan Hinton spent extended time in residency in Corsicana, TX, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, and Fishers Island, NY. Brennan Hinton’s practice focuses on the sustained act of observation, the plein-air discipline, and painting’s ability to capture the essence of a place. The time spent in three distinctive towns, each in its own ways divergent from Brennan Hinton’s familiar Ontario, required the artist to meet each place with open eyes and a fresh palette. To situate himself, Brennan Hinton leaned on two formative texts, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which are each set in the same landscapes in which he painted. As he developed his own understanding of the character of each new town, Brennan Hinton infuses his paintings with an intimacy of place, resulting in pictures that invite the viewer to see through his experiential lens.

Through his study of these canonical American texts, Brennan Hinton connected to the towns he temporarily inhabited through the ecology and narrative devices deeply rooted in these places. He was drawn to the idea that he was painting the same land and sea that the authors were describing—creating a sense of connection both to the past as well as the idea that, just as these books do, his paintings will continue into the future as a depiction of a place in time.

In October 2024, Brennan Hinton spent eight weeks at the Corsicana Artists and Writers Residency. The artist’s first time visiting Texas, he noticed the crispness of the light, the never-ending flatness of the land, and the constancy of the heat and sun, interrupted by but one day of heavy rain. A small boom-and-bust oil town, almost the entirety of Corsicana was visible from the third-floor windows of the old Odd Fellows lodge at the center of town, which was his temporary home and studio. Those windows — the thresholds between his quiet interior space and the sprawling landscape beyond — served as a vantage point for Brennan Hinton’s Texas residency. Particularly drawn to the daily bookends of dawn and dusk — the fleeting moments that seem to expand and slow down time — Brennan Hinton uses these time frames to set constraints that push him to paint in real time. In this way, Brennan Hinton is painting in the lineage of McMurtry. Just as McMurtry grounds the epic Lonesome Dove in the details of daily life contrasted against the expansive journey away from home, Brennan Hinton captures the small Texas town by focusing his paintings on the in-between moments of the day, the times when life is lived and its evidence appears, such as a morning cup of coffee resting on a desk or a rain spattered window, set alongside the distant and consistent horizon line.

The second location Brennan Hinton painted from was Martha’s Vineyard, where the artist spent a number of weeks in late spring. Painting from the docks and shores that punctuate the island’s edge, the artist began to zero in on the elusive horizon line, the ever-moving, unattainable, entirely imagined place where sea and sky meet. If Texas felt immutable, stillness is nowhere present on Martha’s Vineyard in the spring. The quickly shifting environment — gusts of ocean breeze, waves ceaselessly crashing, clouds shrouding the sun— demanded a swift pace of painting. His intimately-scaled paintings, such as Martha’s Vineyard Sunset (2025) and On the Horizon (2025), are painted wet on wet and created over a short span of hours, translations of his visceral impressions and attempts to remember the feeling of a day. While on the island, Brennan Hinton read Moby Dick, thinking about the pursuit of the impossible. Acknowledging the futility of capturing the landscape in its entirety, Brennan Hinton dedicates himself to the observation of the world’s tangential elements and, through his painting, honors them — capturing the beauty of a carefully laid, winding stone path, the boldness of early spring buds.

The work for this exhibition culminated in Fishers Island, where Brennan Hinton spent six weeks as part of The Lighthouse Works Fellowship program. While similar to Martha’s Vineyard in that each island creates its own fast-moving microclimate, Fishers Island was home to the artist for the end of summer, from late August through September — bringing with it crisp, saturated colors, sparkling light, and clear reflections, which the artist captures in paintings such as Pirates Cove (2025) and Peninsula Road (2025). The Fellowship also introduced him to a number of people whose families have lived on the island for generations, several of whom welcomed Brennan Hinton into their homes. The invitations allowed the artist to indulge in his passion for capturing domestic interiors — painting not simply the rooms themselves, but the objects and adornments that reflect the lives lived within their walls. Throughout his career, and as showcased across this exhibition, Brennan Hinton has been drawn to these easily forgotten items and the small moments that comprise a day. Though people are rarely present, the scattered affirmation of their existence (a half-drunk glass of water resting on a bedside table in Corsicana Window (2024), the family tree painted on a wall in Oyster Farm Family Tree (2025), a vase of fresh flowers sitting on a countertop in Daffodils (2025)) imbue his paintings with life, allowing us to observe the beauty found within this fusion of the mundane and the intimate.

Over the last twelve months of travels, the horizon line has been the artist’s constant companion — forever in the distance as he drove for days across the country, hovering in the gray above the Vineyard Sound, or smouldering into the skyline of a heat-baked Texas town. He began each painting with the horizon line, its placement articulating all the elements to follow, shaping his and ultimately our vision. Entirely a figment of our human eyes, the horizon remains ever-present but unreachable. Yet through his paintings, Brennan Hinton does reach it, captures and stills it for us, reminding us not only what it looks like but what it feels like to experience it for ourselves.

The artist would like to thank the Corsicana Artists and Writers Residency, Lighthouse Works, the Ontario Arts Council, and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for their support.

Keiran Brennan Hinton (b. 1992, Toronto) lives and works in Toronto and Elgin, Ontario. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2014 and his MFA from Yale University in 2016. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Ogunquit, ME and The Dennos Museum Center, Traverse City, MI. Past international solo shows of Brennan Hinton’s work include exhibitions at MAKI Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2022); Thomas Fuchs Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany (2021); Charles Moffett, New York, NY (2023, 2021); Nicholas Robert Gallery, Ontario (2022); and Francesco Pantaleone Gallery, Palermo, Italy (2019) among others. His paintings have been featured in institutional exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario; James Castle House, Boise, Idaho; and Katonah Museum of Art, Westchester, NY.