Winter Wonderland

My Four Serialist Group of Seven Paintings

Lake Superior, Isolation Peak, Northern Painting, and Baffin Island (clockwise) @brenttheserialist

As Canada settles into the quiet aftermath of a powerful winter storm, I find myself thinking about snow, silence, and the artists who taught us how to see this country.

This Blog is about my original Serialist painting, Lake Superior—and how it addresses heritage, endurance, and what it means to paint Canada in 2026.

What began as an artistic experiment slowly unfolded into something far more profound: a deeply meditative, and at times spiritual, journey into Canadian identity, landscape, and legacy.

My ongoing Artist’s Masterpiece Series began as an exploration of artistic styles, processes, and the geographic forces that shape how artists work—and why. Through this research-driven practice, I found myself drawn into a contemplative journey of Canadian identity, inspired specifically by Lawren Harris, the Group of Seven, and the northern landscape itself.

As a contemporary mixed-media artist rooted in repetition, structure, and pop-culture iconography, nature and landscape painting felt distant and uninviting. The organic wilderness felt distant from my daily life and yet, that resistance was exactly what pulled me in.

At the heart of this exploration stands Harris, whose bold, stripped-down interpretations of the North forever changed how Canada sees itself. He didn’t paint landscapes as scenery—he painted them as spiritual monuments. Ice, rock, sky, and silence became symbols of clarity, resilience, and national consciousness.

As the founder and leading member of the Group of Seven together they reshaped art history by rejecting European traditions and insisting that Canadian art could—and should—look like Canada itself. Their winter landscapes were not polite or decorative; they were vast, isolating, and unapologetically northern. Snow wasn’t absence—it was presence.

A Serialist Walk Through the North

With each painting in this series—Isolation Peak (2022), Baffin Island (2023), Northern

Painting (2024), and Lake Superior (2025)—I approached the land as Harris once did, but filtered through a technological 21st-century lens.

Instead of traditional brushwork alone, I employed my Serialist process: layered repetition, historical fragments, optical rhythm, and contemporary cut & pasted mixed media. This modernization isn’t about imitation—it’s about translation and visual narration.

Where Harris reduced forms to spiritual geometry, I rebuild them through visual systems. Where the Group of Seven sought national identity through paint, I explore it through structure, totemic narratives, personal experience, and memory. The result is not nostalgia, but conversation—between past and present, wilderness and mind, silence and signal.

To date, I’ve reimagined four of Harris’ iconic artworks:

• Isolation Peak (2022) — Sold

• Baffin Island (2023) — Sold

• Northern Painting (2024) — Sold

• Lake Superior (2025) — Available

Winter as Identity

Winter plays a central role in this work. Snow becomes both subject and metaphor—erasure and revelation at once. In painting frozen lakes and northern peaks, I found myself slowing down, listening, and surrendering control: meditative qualities rarely associated with contemporary life, yet essential to both art-making and survival in this landscape.

With every step in this creative hike, I felt more grounded, more confident, and—perhaps unexpectedly—more Canadian.

In reimagining the Group of Seven for a modern audience, I wasn’t trying to replace their legacy. I was trying to stand beside it. To acknowledge that our relationship with land, identity, and heritage is still evolving—and still worth painting.

Collecting the Journey

  Lake Superior (2025) is currently available for purchase, marking the culmination of this four-year exploration.Isolation Peak, Baffin Island, and Northern Painting now live in private collections—each a chapter of a journey that reshaped not only my practice, but my sense of home.

  This series reminded me that sometimes, the landscapes we avoid are the ones we most need to enter.