ABOUT JOE ENNS | MEET THE ARTIST, WRITER AND BIOLOGIST
Joe’s poetry has been published in
GUSTS, and
Nonfiction publications
The Link
Book Reviews
Joe’s fiction was short-listed for the 2024 Malahat Review Novella Prize and FreeFall’s 2020 Prose and Poetry Contest.
Joe Enns is an oil painter, writer, and fisheries biologist on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Joe is self-taught as an oil painter (YouTube tutorials and magazines), and his subjects range from portraits and figures, to wildlife and landscapes. He is inspired by impressionism and disruptive realism and strives to emulate these aspects in his own work with loose and messy brush strokes.
Joe’s paintings are currently showing at the Nomad Gallery in White Rock, BC. His works have previously appeared in a number of shows and galleries throughout Vancouver Island, the Okanagan, and the Fraser Valley.
Joe has a BA in Creative Writing from Vancouver Island University and a BSc in Ecological Restoration from the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
Literary Publishing
Check out a list of Joe’s books and publishing at the link below.
BC artist Joe Enns painting an oil portrait of Bob Long at the Langley Arts Council portrait competition at the Kinsmen Community Center, Aldergrove in February 2022.
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.