About Joe Enns | Oil Portrait Artist, Author, & Biologist
About Joe Enns
Joe Enns is a self-taught oil portrait artist working from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where he balances his palette between canvas and the natural world as a fisheries biologist. Inspired by impressionism and disruptive realism, Joe builds his portraits through layers of bold, expressive mark-making, each stroke deliberate yet loose, capturing not just likeness but a messy complexity. When he's not painting, he's writing; his nonfiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, and his work has been recognized by the Malahat Review and FreeFall Magazine. His paintings currently show at Nomad Gallery in White Rock, BC.
Background
With a BA in Creative Writing and Journalism from Vancouver Island University and a BSc in Ecological Restoration from the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Joe spent years studying how to observe and learn—whether crafting narratives or researching rivers. His training as a painter came later and less formally: YouTube tutorials, art magazines, and countless hours of trial and error in front of the canvas. This self-taught approach shaped his style, exploring intuition and experimentation with progressing technique. His work has appeared in galleries throughout Vancouver Island, the Okanagan, and the Fraser Valley, each exhibition reflecting his evolving dialogue between precision and expressiveness.
Artist Statement
Humans are social primates hardwired to read each other’s faces and expressions to gather context and meaning from our surroundings. How we read faces influences how we experience the world. Through my oil portraits focused on the face, I balance realism with impressionism, expressiveness with accuracy to build layers of complexity. Capturing someone’s likeness through the emergence of the face in an archival medium creates a moment of meaning, an echo of the self in the perpetual conversation of mankind. My paintings are a layering of strong brush or palette knife strokes that are often mistakes, but the messy collection of flaws forms the painting’s character, much like the subject.
