CONTACT | FOR MORE INFORMATION AND COMMISSIONS

I do portrait commissions! Please feel free to contact me using the email form below and I will respond directly with sizing and price options. I have experience painting live sitters and painting from photos.

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The source photos for many of the portraits in this collection come from the Museum by Sktchy app. Favourite painting materials include Gamblin Oil Paints and the Strada Plein Air easel. Joe has been painting seriously as a self-taught artist since 2014 and has shown in many exhibitions around British Columbia from the Okanagan to the Lower Mainland to Vancouver Island. Paintings often take a long time, many layers of oil and wax pressed together with a palette knife.

Joe began painting many different subjects such as landscapes and wildlife, but painted figures in portraits because he read that if you can paint a portrait you can paint anything. Capturing a likeness and skin tone can be difficult and unforgiving. Eventually, Joe switched to only painting portraits because he enjoyed it so much. And Joe ramped-up to paint a face a week during the COVID-19 lockdown while faces in public settings were covered with masks. Like art therapy.

Others have often remarked that portraits don’t sell well, but Joe has learned that an interesting painting will sell no matter the subject matter. The trick is to make the painting interesting enough to resonate with the audience.

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.

Bio

Joe Enns is a Canadian painter, writer, and fisheries biologist on Vancouver Island. His paintings--mostly portraits focussing on the face—have exhibited in galleries throughout Vancouver Island, the Fraser Valley, and the Okanagan. The Nomad Gallery in White Rock, BC, carries a collection of Joe’s work. Joe’s writing has been published in numerous literary magazines including The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, FreeFall, Event Magazine and The Dalhousie Review.