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Biography
Brent Heighton has been painting for over 30 years fulltime. After college Brent began a brief career in the commercial art field. Not satisfied with the deadlines, the rush jobs, and working out other peoples ideas as to how they wanted things to look, he realized that as difficult as working in the Fine Arts was, becoming a painter of what you want and not what someone else wants, was the most important and satisfying. He has never looked back on or regretted taking that chance.
Working as a fulltime Artist has allowed Brent to travel all over the world in search of ideas and things to paint. Brent has traveled with his family to Europe, spending time in France, Holland, Belgium, and as far south as Greece. All the time with paints and brushes in hand, always looking for that inspiration just around the corner. The difference of light in a place like Greece compared to Cornwall, England is very exciting says Brent.
Brent and Elizabeth winter in their home in Mexico. The architecture, the people, and the light keep enticing Brent back there, “I find Mexico helps my creative juices start to flow when I’m there and I love the color of the light.” says Brent.
Brent’s watercolours, acrylics and oils have been well received by many corporate and private collectors in over 30 countries of the world. Brent has had exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, Germany, Belgium, Holland, many parts of the U.S.and most recently Mexico.
His work has won him numerous awards throughout Canada and the U.S. But the important thing is, as Brent points out is not the awards, it’s how it makes you feel putting your feelings on paper or canvas so that the persons observing can experience the joy you had in painting that particular artwork.
“If you can make that connection with someone it feels great inside” he says.
Continuing to explore new ideas and approaches to painting, he is never happy to stay in one place creatively. And his work continues to grow and mature as he pushes his creative boundaries.
“It has been a bumpy ride over a long period of time to arrive at this point. I liken it to the uncertainty of Charles Lindberg’s quest to be the first flyer to wing his way across the Atlantic. You get the plane off the ground – somewhat of an accomplishment in itself – and reach an altitude where you feel everything’s under control. But then there are a series of mechanical concerns or foul weather systems that constantly test your mettle and cause you to question the wisdom of your choice to set such a lofty goal. And wherein I haven’t landed my plane successfully yet, at least I’m still aloft, and the propeller keeps on churning!
Brent’s Early Years
I was born in Vancouver in 1954. My sister Roberta, preceded me by twelve years and my brother, Jim, by a decade. At five, my family relocated to Pitt Meadows, then a rural community in the Fraser valley of British Columbia. My father was a long-time employee for BC Hydro, while my mother dedicated herself to her family.
Our new home was a hobby farm, and we truly enjoyed the country life. There was an orchard of apple, pear, and cherry trees, hazelnut trees and blueberry, strawberry and raspberry patches. We got gallons of fresh milk and cream from our very productive cow, and there were lots of geese and chickens roaming the yard. I was often sent to our sizeable garden to retrieve fresh vegetables to feed the dozens of extended family members and other friends who would drop in on sunny summer days and stay for dinner.
The small farm was surrounded by property that had been logged years before, leaving log bridges over creeks and log roads through marshy areas that, as a young explorer, were great paths to adventure. Our own place had stands of big evergreens.
The farm also had its own swimming hole, a spring-fed pond that my grandfather transformed into a pool by hauling in huge rocks and cementing them together, and then laying in a bottom of sand. The spring kept it fresh, but occasionally, we would drain it and dig out all the dead leaves. Even before we were out of school for summer holidays and right into the next fall’s school term, my chums and I would play for hours in the swimming hole.
I had to walk a mile down a country road each day to go to school. As with everything when you’re younger, the distance seemed farther, just as the house and the farm seemed bigger.
The only wild creature I tamed, besides a rangy billy goat from down the road, was a racoon. She was a great magnet for attracting girls. Anytime I went to the park with ‘Bandit’, the girls would immediately invite me over.
For a brief time, I had a horse called ‘Mouse’. She was dapple grey and part-arab, part-Welsh pony. Our initial meeting was a memorable one. I had been bugging my parents for a long time about wanting a horse, and when they finally gave in and brought ‘Mouse’ home, she bucked me off the first time I got on her. I wasn’t so sure I wanted a horse after that. In fact, I wouldn’t go near her for awhile. Then I got tired of everyone telling me I was a chicken, so I met the challenge head on.
My dad would saddle her daily just in case I was ready to try riding again. I had heard that if a horse put its head down, it could buck, so to keep her head up – I tied a short rope from her bridle to the saddle horn. I also tied another short rope from a front leg to a back leg to keep her from running. I got on and let her limp her way out to a field. If she’d have chosen to go ballistic, I’m sure she would have rolled over me, but within minutes, I was hollering for my mother to come and see how good I was riding. Mom, the ever-enthusiastic encourager, ignored the ridicules way I had hobbled the poor horse and complimented me on how good I was doing. After that, ‘Mouse’ and I were inseparable, galloping for hours around the cow pasture.
My mother constantly encouraged me in most everything I did, especially when I drew. She appreciated the humor in my drawings. My father’s reaction to my creations was more along the lines, “You can’t make a living drawing cartoons.”
My siblings had grown up and left home so my father decided to take a leave of absence from his work. He sold the farm and moved us to southern Ontario to be near my sister who had relocated and started her own family.
As we drove past Kenora and Thunder Bay over the Canadian Shield, I felt relived that I could call this beautiful new land my home. But then we came to the industrialized cities in the south of the province, and my heart sank. Gone were the wild woods and semi-wilderness of my youth.
We settled in Dresden, Ontario, and I entered high school as a stranger to everyone around me. Fortunately, through my doodling, I had developed a knack for doing caricatures. Soon I had kids asking me to do a cartoon of them, or a friend or teacher. It was my ticket to popularity, and the beginning of a positive experience that forced me to rely on my own abilities and deal with the fears connected to this new adventure.
I enrolled in a grade eleven art class taught by Mrs. Suderman. Freda Suderman loved her work, and I guess she considered me a work in progress. She took me under her wing.
I was always eager to get to her class, and was embarrassed – yet secretly proud – when she would pay me additional attention, using my work as an example in front of the class, or encouraging me to draw a specific assignment yet again, from another angle or perspective. She showed concern. She made me work hard. She knew how to inspire me.
We all hopefully have a teacher or two we remember as having had a remarkable influence on our lives, such as Mrs. Suderman had on mine. It was well under her tutelage, that I recognized that painting was to be my great passion. I graduated from high school and floated for awhile. I came back to British Columbia that summer and travelled around, working on construction.
When I returned to Ontario, I took a job in Chatham in the suspension division of a factory that made springs for cars and trucks. In the course of my work, I discovered ‘paint sticks’, a kind of wax-like bar like an oil pastel that was used to number and code pieces that came off the assembly line. When you touched the stick to the side of one of the hot furnaces in the plant, the colour flowed from it as if it was a magic wand. And there were dozens of brilliant colours to choose. With my penchant for doing cartoons and caricatures, my love of humor and my new-found weapons, I waged war on the drab black of the furnaces in the factory. Within weeks, I had the entire place looking like Disneyland had collided with a paint factory!
One day a memo appeared on the bulletin board announcing the visit of a committee of major shareholders. It also pronounced that the factory was going to receive a new paint job. And there was an added paragraph that said, “We appreciate Mr. Heighton’s artistic talent, but we feel he should be expressing his ability elsewhere.”
While the edict was a warning I could lose my job, it was also public recognition that I should consider a career in the arts. It made me think. I was making good money, but did I really want to work in a factory for the rest of my life?
By the end of that year I had moved to Ottawa, begun working part-time in the shipping department of a furniture store, and painted landscape and architectural watercolours in my spare time. I was enrolled in arts courses at Algonquin College. My original plan was to sign up for the commercial art program, because I believed I would find it easier to make a living at commercial art, but when I showed the department head examples of my work, he steered me directly into the fine arts program.
Of equal importance in many ways was the realization I could make money in the art business. A constant yearning I had for the west coast finally won out, and in 1976, I moved back to Vancouver. Selling men’s wear brought in some money, but to top up my financial reserves, I fell back on my skill of creating caricatures and set up shop in Stanley Park along with the other artists at the entrance to the zoo. I added a twist to my new circumstance by also selling my paintings – some oils, mostly watercolours.
The more I painted, the more I wanted to learn about painting. I visited Douglas College, where I stirred up a bit of a commotion with the bureaucrats in admissions. I was again interested in graphic arts, because I believed it would help me to develop my technical abilities, but I also wanted to study more life drawing, which was offered by the fine arts department. The advisor was set on having me understand that I couldn’t be in both programs at the same time. The more she persisted, the more I kept requesting even more courses that crossed departmental boundaries. Completely exasperated, she finally told me that I could not expect to get credit for any courses if I chose to hopscotch between the two programs. A deal was immediately struck.
For the next two years, I audited courses at all levels of both programs part-time, while drawing and painting, often in Stanley Park, for several hours a day – practicing, practicing, practicing. I also used the knowledge gained in some of my commercial art courses to make additional money doing animation projects and illustrations. I had succeeded in designing an educational experience to meet my own needs, sacrificing the piece of paper that would say I was a graduate.
When I was twenty-four, I met the love of my life, my wife, Bettie. The commitment resulted in an instant family in that I acquired a wonderful six-year old daughter. Terri is Bettie’s child from a previous marriage, and I luckily gained the love of two exceptional females at the same time. In another nine years, our family would grow by one more when Julie, our second beautiful daughter, would be born. Bettie worked part-time for the first few years of our marriage, and by combining our incomes, we happily survived. Bettie’s support has always been there.
I had taken everything I could at Douglas College, so I began to explore art workshops. The first was with Rex Brandt of the National Academy of American Watercolorists Society, whose work I had seen and admired in numerous art magazines. His wife, Joan Irving, was also a celebrated artist, and together they came to Vancouver to give a workshop.
A significant insight I gained from interacting with many older artists and instructors at workshops was that they all wished they could have committed to the goal of art when they were much younger. They felt they had wasted too much time travelling other paths. Their honesty made me determined not to make the same mistake.
Under the umbrella of the Federation of Canadian Artists, and the co-sponsorship of the Federation Gallery in Gastown, Allen Edwards, a Vancouver artist, encouraged a number of younger painters to plan and participate in The Saltspring Seminar. The camaraderie of sharing several days under the tutelage of established artists, such as Edwards, Harry Heine and Bill Reese from the States, was a hallmark experience. We enjoyed an inspirational day with each artist/instructor, always at a different location, and then would continue in the evening, staying up until all hours to discuss the art. The Federation flourished, offering an ongoing network for artists to gather and share, and staging art exhibitions, such as the Under 30 show where I would display my work. It was an exciting and stimulating environment, with sincere involvement and fantastic optimism.
Workshops have been a way for me to rejuvenate, to explore new options, and to learn. The positive sum of all those experiences is the reason that I have been offering workshops for over a decade where I am committed to helping people develop their creativity – especially through practice, practice, practice. Initially, I was not happy with my art unless I could differentiate between each blade of grass in a field I had painted. Realism was my touchstone. It seemed that as I became competent with a specific technique, I became tired of it. I took risks to attempt different kinds of artistic styles. I found I liked to work in abstract.
It has been a bumpy ride over a long period of time to arrive at this point. I liken it to the uncertainty of Charles Lindberg’s quest to be the first flyer to wing his way across the Atlantic. You get the plan off the ground – somewhat of an accomplishment in itself – and reach an altitude where you feel everything’s under control. But then there are a series of mechanical concerns or foul weather systems that constantly test your mettle and cause you to question the wisdom of your choice to set such a lofty goal. And wherein I haven’t landed my plane successfully yet, at least I’m still aloft, and the propeller keeps on churning! While there has been – and I suspect will continue to be – constant hurdles to overcome, I have been extremely fortunate. It has not been all that difficult to keep a positive outlook towards my work. When a new blanket of snow smothers the countryside, I am inspired. When the azaleas and rhododendrons burst into bloom in my garden and my Koi fish reappear, I’m keen to paint. The angles of branches in a forest or the way the light streams through them can cause me to rush to my studio. A weathered fence, a golf green, fish boats in a harbour, intriguing architecture, waterfowl on a pond: all or any can move me to paint. And when I am painting, I am happiest.
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