Article by KM Wehrstein/Photography by Tomasz Szumski

His paintings seize the eyes. Unabashedly brilliant colours swirl together, strictly delineated by knife-sharp lines. A highly stylized yet anatomically accurate bird or fish is frozen in frenetic movement. A purple wolf or orange moose stands majestically motionless in an utterly natural pose. Four ravens circle in a lockstep “x” against a glowing golden moon and a brooding deep blue sky that radiates their shapes. A vibrantly indigo hawk wildly flies against a background of pure dazzling scarlet. An airborne fish and a submerged loon dance together in a yin-yang-esque image whimsically entitled “Trading Places.” All these wild creatures are strikingly encased in black-cored borders that arrest and demand full visual notice.

Mark Kulas’s art is precise as an engineer’s draft, attaining moods through shape and colour. His art is bold but it would be an error to think it is not subtle or painstaking. Where there is not contrast between colours, there is subtle harmony. Where he wants to create a gradient of one colour into another, he doesn’t blend them; he creates the effect by painting hundreds of tiny dots of changing frequency. One at a time.

The eyes of his creatures have a certain calm and wisdom.

“I stylize like mad,” Kulas explains. “I enjoy skimming off the superfluous detail and producing something that’s very identifiable. I have done super-realistic nature art, but it’s photo reproduction, it’s easy. It’s not nearly as much of a challenge.”

The Ottawa-born artist is often asked if his work is inspired by First Nations art. In style, he explains, he is definitely influenced, particularly by the legendary Anishinaabe painter Norval Morrisseau, who also used bright colours within black outlines.

“There’s something about that that is eye-catching,” Kulas acknowledges, then adds unabashedly, “But being a professional illustrator, I wanted it tighter.” However abstract, his creatures are always clearly identifiable.

For content, he is inspired the same way First Nations artists of the Precambrian Shield are inspired: by having lived most of his life surrounded by the particular species that live over granite and, spending much of his time in the wild, with them. But he also traces his creative roots to his Polish heritage, not to mention modern Western principles of composition and colour theory acquired in his training and career as a graphic designer.

Along Highway 60 east of Algonquin Park lie the municipalities of Wilno and Barry’s Bay, home of a large Polish community. Kulas’s family hails from here.

“My mother did needlepoint on table runners and pillow covers, with thick black outlines on flowers, roosters and so on,” he recalls; such images can also be found in the area on signs and barns. He grew up on a farm next to Golden Lake, near Pembroke, that adjoined crown land. “So, I got on snowshoes or skis or my Canadian Tire bicycle and went places.”

Of his childhood schooling, Kulas says, “I was dyslexic, so academically I was a mess. I had teachers letting me through thinking I could make a living digging ditches. Drawing or doing art was something I looked at that didn’t require mathematical or verbal ability, and there were people in my family who had artistic ability who were looked at highly.”

Despite not being noticed as an artist – he still claims to have no natural talent, only skill gained by unceasing practice – he threw himself into it.

“By the time I was in high school, I was one of the geeky artists,” Kulas shares. “Just through the amount of time I put into this stuff, I got good at it. All my other marks were barely passing but I scored high in art.”

His efforts enabled him to attend Algonquin College in Ottawa for graphic design, which he financed by moving furniture.

“My capacity was recognized in something in which I found no difficulty,” he says. “There was a strong illustration component to the program and that was something in which I really excelled.”

Graduating in 1986, he jumped into the field right away. He has done graphic design for the federal Auditor-General’s office in Ottawa and Saint John Regional Hospital in New Brunswick, living in the Maritimes for four years.

“I did a lot of corporate identity work,” Kulas says. “I’d be asked, ‘Simplify our ideal, our company, our mission, to a logo that can be put on an envelope.’ Any piece I did was a challenge to solve.” If his art seems sometimes to have a logo-like visual simplicity and unity, hence power, there’s a reason.

In 1991 he moved to Pembroke, where he still lives in winter. Summer is spent at a spectacularly situated cottage on Bella Lake, east of Huntsville, which belongs to the family of his common-law wife since 1998, high-school teacher Kathleen Mottershead.

As well as being a full-time graphic designer, Kulas says, “I was drawing or painting all the time. I began going to studio tours or outdoor art shows. I’d see a lot of work that had a certain sameness, that made me think ‘I can compete, I need to pursue this’.”

Starting out as a guest artist on a studio tour in 2007, he began to have success, possibly because his art doesn’t contribute at all to any sameness.

In 2010, he was offered use of the cottage as a stop on the Artists of the Limberlost Studio Tour and has continued to participate. As well as original paintings, he now sells prints, art cards, T-shirts and more, though some of these items are now also available at retailers in Huntsville and Bracebridge.

“It’s kind of taken off,” he says. Accordingly, his career is now 90 per cent art and 10 per cent graphic design for a few longstanding favoured clients.

If one can sense a certain muscularity, self-discipline and endurance in Kulas’s paintings, it could relate to a strong streak of athleticism rooted in his childhood wilderness treks and early swimming lessons. Always wanting to take on challenges, he competes in cross-county skiing, masters swimming and cycling, and is a former triathlete. This past Victoria Day weekend he participated in the ‘Spin the Lakes’ charity ride. He usually carries a canoe or kayak on the roof of his vehicle in case he comes by a lake or river that tempts him to explore and find inspiration.

For Kulas, a painting starts with wanting to do something different. “If I last worked on a big piece, I want to work on a small one,” he shares.

Except for commissions, he tries to vary the subject, too. “I do a lot of biking,” Kulas explains. “If I see a deer, I’ll think ‘I’m going to do a deer’. I have to refer to some sort of reference – though I can do a loon in my sleep. They’re pretty basic and I know where all the spots are.”

Execution begins with pencil sketching. “Draw, erase, correct, decide how big I want it to be,” says Kulas. “I plot that stuff as I work, out of the pencil sketch. I’ll draw for a day then come back to it a few times in the next day or so, to correct proportions; you need to have a fresh eye at times.”

Next, by using a grid system – he creates a grid on the sketch and a larger grid on the canvas – Kulas transfers the image in sections onto the canvas.

“Then I start working on the beastie,” he says. “The colours are me having fun. I paint purple wolves and blue wolves, though foxes will always be red. If I just painted the tones of nature, they’d be all grey and brown. If I go too bizarre, I’ll go away from the nature of the animal, but I’m going to have fun.”

It involves trial and error, of course, though he has noticed that he has to do less and less of that as he racks up experience.

Of his gradient by pure-colour dots methodology, he says, “It’s laborious, but when I get it right, I love it, it works. It’s my style. I enjoy the challenge of solving that problem. If I blended, I wouldn’t be happy with it. It is a resolution to a challenge. I’ve tightened up a lot, was looser and a lot less accurate when I started.”

Like many artists in every form of art, he has early works hidden away that no one will ever see.

“I can’t sit for too long, so I paint for three to four hours a day, max,” he says. “For a two-by-three-foot canvas, I’ll be at that for a month before I’m happy with it. A lot of the time is spent on multiple coats; almost everything gets hit twice.”

Because he never blends, he can take his time using acrylics and store colours he has mixed for one painting in resealable containers. He’s decidedly not a palette-painter.

“I don’t want to show brush strokes or texture,” he says. “People ask what computer I printed them off of  but it’s all done by hand. I wanted to paint pictures that didn’t look like anyone else’s. And wanted it to look Canadian. I’m happy with the style I’m producing.”

Mark Kulas will be on the Artists of the Limberlost Studio Tour again this year, meaning you can see his art up close and meet him on August 16-18. The precipitous climb down to the cottage on zigzagging wooden stairs, built so the curvaceous trunk of a massive cedar tree is incorporated into them, is totally worth it.