Kirsten Brand

James Bay Art Walk artist profile

By Anne Hansen

A striking three-part painting of grassy vegetation reflected in a pond greets the visitor to Kirsten Brand's house on Ontario Street. Painted in the 1980s, it's one of several artworks inspired by regular visits to Salt Spring Island. She enjoyed a period of painting water scenes on St. Mary Lake on Salt Spring, the place of a frequently-visited cottage that's been in her family for years.

Kirsten's current paintings are of a more abstract mixed-media variety, with lots of colour and texture, some incorporating beautiful preserved plant material.

Art was a natural part of Kirsten's growing up. Both of her parents played in the Victoria Symphony. They were "instrumental" in writing up the orchestra's charter in 1942. Kirsten's favourite composers are Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Mahler. "But I love them all,' she says. A musical ensemble is the subject of a painting she did when she was five, still nicely preserved in a frame made by her father.

Kirsten inherited her mother's passion for collecting and preserving botanical specimens. In fact, her parents created a collaborative artwork with paint, embedded leaves, flowers, and petals, that hangs in Kirsten's living room.

It's no surprise that Kirsten's studio is impeccably organized like a museum, with cupboards full of pressed plants, some of which her mother picked and saved. Kirsten's husband Ross, now retired, worked in archeology at the Royal BC Museum before becoming their facilities manager. They got to travel all over BC in search of petroglyphs, of which Ross made casts for the museum.

Kirsten says, "I went into nursing in order to finance my art". As a nurse, she alternated between working full-time and part-time, in order to accommodate her art studies. She started out at UVic, but wasn't terribly impressed with the environment there. At the time, there was very little studio space, making it difficult to actually create art. However, she blossomed at the Victoria College of Art, where she studied from 1978 to 1981 with artists Jim Gordaneer, Jack Wise, and Bill Porteous. Students were instructed to "leave your ego at the door".

Kirsten's nursing career was diverse, with positions in maternity and psychiatry. She speaks fondly of nursing at Eric Martin Pavillion, here in Victoria, with the cognitive behavioural therapy and art and music groups. This program helped people make the transition from treatment to the outside world. Here she got to design and run classes in art, music, and physical fitness. Occasionally she still has the pleasure of running into former patients who long ago battled anxiety, depression, or other disorders. "After I left, very sadly, the program was discontinued. It was very cost-effective because people were all out-patients. It was very holistic in its approach," she recalls.

Kirsten and Ross have spent the past few winters in the desert of the US southwest. For weeks at a time, they enjoy living from their recreational vehicle, with Kirsten making art along the way. I recommended to her the book Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, a great nature classic in defense of the planet.

Kirsten looks forward to making more desert art in the coming months.

See Kirsten Brand's work on the James Bay Art Walk, September 14 & 15, 2013.

Kirsten's website: