Brenna George is a Winnipeg-based artist working in video and painting. Her video work has been screened nationally and internationally since 1990, at festivals ranging from Basse Normandie to New South Wales. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited at many galleries including Artspeak and Grunt Gallery in Vancouver; White Water Gallery in North Bay, Ontario. Her video work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Surrey Art Gallery.

Her fluid technical experiments in image editing and compositing combine with a sensibility that is humorous, visually lush, and playful. Her paintings explore an identity of place and a physical experience of Canadian landscape. Raw and gestural, they suggest the isolation of the artist in nature. Still lifes, that take as their subject banquet tables, small animals, cakes and birds, toys placed in theatrical tableaux, address her experience and that of other women. Small in scale, they are subtle and poignant investigations of the space of the domestic.

Monica: When did you know that you were an artist? Were you always drawing or creating as a child?
Brenna: I grew up in Victoria so I spent a lot of time at the beach making patterns with shells, rocks, and small driftwood. A favourite at the beach was making rosehip drinking bowls and filling them with drops of water for fairies to find and use later.  I was also outside in our backyard just playing with dirt and rocks and leaves and making them into things. Even in the schoolyard there was a massive oak tree and in grades one and two I played endlessly with the acorns. So it was more sculpture for me from the beginning and I loved being outside. Then in grade eight, I switched from grade school to Central Jr. High where I had my first art class and I spent all my time in the art room. I think that is the first time that I put the title art to what I was doing. I played dungeons and dragons with the art club at lunch and then I would stay making ceramics until late at night in the art room often alone. I made lots of small animals and then large ceramic murals. In grade 10 I got my first job as a sales clerk at Victoria Book and Stationary, the local art supply store. My second job in grade 11 was a summer job as an apprentice to a potter where I learned to throw on a wheel, fire a walk-in gas kiln, and wedge 100s of pounds of clay with my feet.

M: When did you start making videos? Was it a natural transition from your earlier art-making?
B: When I was a kid in the ’70s for part of the summers my brother and sister and I would travel by bus from Victoria to Wisconsin, to Echo Lake to stay with my grandparents and every year we would make a short film. Grandpa Edward was a Presbyterian minister who painted watercolours, had a photography darkroom and made films. He loved technology and had a super 8 camera.  In the films, he had artistic control and we would act. One summer we made “Beat the Cluck” a fake game show where all of us cousins competed in strange events for the film. My next video experience was when another artist at Emily Carr art school had me come up to the video studio and made a video of just me dancing alone. I remember the studio on the second floor it was sort of hidden and quiet compared to the sculpture studio. It was all black with bright lights this odd environment of darkness and bright white. I loved dancing and I always danced this crazy sort of a mix of styles of punk meets talking heads kind of dancing with a bit of 20s Charleston and moves I had seen in a Fellini film.

I was pretty open to making anything, I was a lot more fluid with my art then so video was not a big transition. I love working in all mediums. I made my first video when I was in my 20’s and I was living in a communal house with other artists in Vancouver. One of the artists Laura Lamb was a video artist and she asked me to make a video with her. We made “They met in a Garden”. I made tons of small sculptures that the camera could pan around. We edited at Video In which was another black ominous space but it did have great exercise equipment to use in the communal area when we took breaks from editing.  Video Out would not distribute our video because we used music clips mixed from records for our soundtrack. When I moved to Osler, Saskatchewan to be with a boyfriend and started “Clank” an art welding business, we explored a lot of abandoned farms looking for scrap metal in their junk piles. I became inspired by the feminine wallpaper in the abandoned farmhouses and wanted to record the decaying patterns. I had little money and no equipment so I joined Video Verité in Saskatoon and had access to all the cameras and editing suites in exchange for volunteer hours. I made “Wallpaper”, it was my first solo video.  I think I made more videos after that because I liked being near other artists and painting and sculpture was isolating. Also because I am a prolific creator I had too many objects and video has a small output of physical stuff. Then Rick Fisher became my boyfriend and his only art medium is video so both of these reasons solidified video as my main medium for the next 15 years.

M: Do you consider animation or video-making, in general, a solo or group process? How do you engage with collaborators or crew for your videos?
B: Video for me was so much less lonely than sculpture and painting because the editing was done at artist-run centres where lots of cool artists would hang out. You could see and chat with other artists making their videos and were asked to put work in distribution share and show your work, which is rare with sculpture and painting but common in video.  For a while, I did collaborative video with almost anyone who would ask me. I liked working with others, but slowly I just wanted to say my own thing not mesh my ideas with other people ideas. Video for me now is solo practice except for audio because I don’t think in audio, I am a visual thinker. I have commissioned a lot of great audio artists to make audio for my work. Tom Elliott, Christine Fellows, John Samson and my daughter Ozma George are a few that have taken my visual video edit and thought about it and created sound to bring it out further.

M: What is it that attracts you to this medium to express yourself?
B: I have been continuously making things since I was little and the amount of physical pieces of art that build up with my output is overwhelming.  Sculpture needs massive amount of storage, painting lots of storage but video has very little object output.  I like the amount of imagery that can be compressed into a video. When I started the 3/4″ tapes were big but then storage just kept shrinking, s-video, Hi-8 tapes and now it is just on chips and DVD disks.

Some of my ideas need movement or time progression that video allows. I love the progression of things in video, the moving an idea and evolving over time in a video. Editing enables such tight control of the world. Sometimes I love that precise decision making and other times I don’t like that and my nightmares used to consist of being trapped between two frames of video shuttling back and forth between them.

M: I’m interested in how artists use their own life for inspiration in their work.  How much do you use your own life as a jumping-off point for your art and video-making? 
B: When I first started living with Rick my video was a collaborative piece with him, “Front Step”, when I had a miscarriage my video work was “Dirt, Dissolution” and “Winter”. My work closely follows my personal arc. I often abstract or generalize but sometimes it is straight on journalistic. I like work with feelings and personal experiences in other people's work too.

M: Do you have any favourite artists, animators or people you look to for inspiration or mentorship?
B: My partner Rick Fisher spent 7 years making one short video which has recently been accepted in over 60 festivals around the world. His process makes me understand the long haul of artistic drive and vision. My favourite animators are; Daniel Barrow has a beautiful drawing style and quirky ideas, Alison Davis installation animation work that references the body is though-provoking and Alain Delannoy's intensity /volume of drawings per animation is inspiring. I really like the whiteboard draw your life videos you-tubers do. My 13-year-old daughter Oona has her own youtube channel. Her animations have quirky ideas and strong graphic style and she collaborates with other animators. I look forward to her next post.  Go subscribe to her channel because young animators need our support, Gookola is her channel.

My 16-year-old daughter Ozma also inspires me because she draws effortlessly and surprises me with her inventive characters. When we draw together she has a much easier time departing from reality than I do. We drew together for five solid days when I made my video “Winter Cove Trail”. I drew the trail path at 30-foot intervals and she did a series of cubist drawings. Check out some of her digital drawings at Dewgongie.DeviantArt.com

For painters right now I am inspired by the Irish naughty drippy painter Genieve Figgis.

All the Artists in the Artist Mothers Group at MAWA who make moving personalized work about mothering have been so supportive and inspirational for me for the last 7 years.

M: Do you have any advice for young artists?
B: I feel a lot of my life has been crippled financially because all I want to do is make art. I thought the world would just fill in the money bit if I just worked harder at my art and made more art and amazing art.  Read the book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, it has great advice about the arts and money. Don’t expect the world to financially compensate you for being super creative or a great artist. Take care of the finances another way and then totally go for it creatively artistically with no holding back because you have nothing to lose and no constraints. Yes, I sell, get artist fees for showing and arts grants but those are so infrequent and unreliable sources. Stock up supplies when that happens but keep your work flowing/going with a daily art practice no matter how short per day because it builds ideas, skills, and happiness like nothing else. Welcome to the creative side of life. Be a creator not a consumer of media. Be kind and encouraging to other creative people.

M: Artistically, what’s next for you?
B: For the past three years I have been making different series of one-a-day small oil paintings. In a way it is like very slow video. I work in large multiples like frame-by-frame video. My idea and subject evolves as I progress through the series. Right now I am doing 100 days of couples, taking opposing personalities and idea sets and pairing them together to explore why we choose the partners we do. I post on Instagram, Facebook and DeviantArt and I have an audience that follows me daily which encourages me to continue. I want to start making video poems of time-lapse painting. Look for my upcoming youtube channel and visit my website to see what I am up to.