This painter turned a 1918 schoolhouse into a dream art studio

jeffsovayAugust 30, 2022

By early 2020, artist Kieran Brennan-Hinton had lived in New York for nearly a decade while sharing an apartment in the Bronx with three roommates. He spent most of his time painting in a small studio nearby. Located on his sixth floor in a brick industrial building, he is a 320-square-foot commercial space.

Born in Toronto and educated at Yale University, Brennan Hinton’s serene renderings of domestic interiors have appeared in galleries in the United States and Europe, as well as the Ontario Art Museum. In New York he became more and more drawn to the countryside of Fairfield Porter and Lois Dodd. He found himself dreaming of a hideaway in a country where he could work outside. Plein Air painting.

Around the same time, his mother, Melanie Brennan, an elementary school teacher, announced that she wanted to retire in a few years. I started looking. With her $230,000 budget, including renovation costs, Brennan her Hinton began scrutinizing listings in Ontario and upstate New York. His mode of transportation was a red Vespa, zipping along pebbly country roads lined with fields of grazing cattle.

Light My Fire | The wood stove in the living room is the main heat source in the building.

Eventually, he found a one-room schoolhouse in Elgin, Ontario, about an hour and a half drive from Ottawa, built in 1918 and closed in 1967. It was dotted with holes into which desks were screwed. “There were no traditional partition walls. Almost everything was built with solid wood and nothing was veneered.”

Brennan Hinton said the property was Plein Air painting. Although the windows had been updated for energy conservation, Brennan Hinton believes the original windows, speckled with pink and blue paint, once marked separate entrances for men and women. The previous owner of the house was a Shaw Festival set builder who restored the building to be habitable. When Brennan Hinton owned it in April 2020, the owner removed the original tin ceiling to open up the space and installed two wooden lofts.

SET PIECES | A Shaw Festival set builder, the previous owner added an addition to the back of the school building that now serves as Brennan Hinton’s art studio.

Old vs New | The windows had already been updated for energy savings, but the original windows were kept in a storeroom on the property.

Before becoming a teacher, Melanie studied architecture. She drew up a renovation plan that included removing the mezzanine staircase that spans the middle of the house and rebuilding them on the sides to create a more expansive space. Moved bathroom. Brennan Hinton did the framing and drywall himself. Paying homage to the building’s history, he installed milk glass light fixtures from a nearby antique store that he had collected from another schoolhouse.

“I’m trying to create a space where you can imagine.”

Recently, Brennan Hinton has been spending time in Elgin and Toronto, sharing an apartment with her partner, curator and art critic Tatum Dooley. “There’s a sense of freedom and lightness about working in a school building, which I think is refreshing,” he says. Its size also helps Brennan Hinton practice, giving him space to stretch and prime the canvas in his home. It was no easy task to manage in a small studio in the Bronx.The schoolhouse also inspired his work. A recent piece titled ‘His Week in November’ captures his main floor in the light. Another piece called “Sun Shower” has clothes hanging in rows outside. “You can tell the age of my paintings by the way the leaves change outside the window,” he says. “Everything is golden in October, green in July, and in his January when the sun sets, the snow is all blue.” Appears in a solo exhibition at his gallery.

LIFE IMITATES ART | Brennan Hinton developed a love for his school building by painting it.

“Each piece becomes a record of what was there and can remain in an ever-changing space,” he says.

In schoolhouses, Brennan Hinton says timelessness can be blended with immediacy. “I’m interested in finding that nuance and making a painting that feels true to a particular moment,” he explains. Neighbors and strangers pull up on the dirt road and tell Brennan his Hinton about its history. One former student recently showed Brennan Hinton where she and her classmates used to play, near the wooden shack that still stands. I sent him an old newspaper clipping with a picture of children lined up outside the front door.

“I try to create spaces where people can daydream,” says Brennan Hinton.

This article appeared in the September 2022 issue of . McLean’s magazine.buy issue$8.99 Or even better, just subscribe to the monthly magazine $29.99.