Mark Kulas is just one of the artists you’ll see at the Limberlost Open Studio Tour

Photos courtesy of Mark Kulas

At the Artists of the Limberlost Open Studio Tour, you don’t just get to see beautiful art. You get to meet the artists, too. There are 19 of them spread across seven host studios and they love to answer questions about the work that they do.

Mark Kulas is one of those artists. His year-round studio is in Pembroke, but in the summer he often paints at the family cottage on Bella Lake, sometimes at the table, sometimes in the gazebo, sometimes at the dock.

The location provides ample inspiration for his vibrant paintings depicting simplified versions of the natural world, a style he’s been working in since about 2001.

For Mark, art has been an almost life-long pursuit.

“It’s all I’ve really been able to do,” he says. “I grew up dyslexic and no one really had the capacity to spot that. Academically, I wasn’t exactly setting the house on fire, so I took on the challenge of art and with practice it came.”

He used to do detailed and accurate wildlife art. “A lot of the work I had been doing was black and white or earth tones. But then I saw this style – a simplied version of an image that has aboriginal influences from around the world.” Being a professional illustrator and graphic designer, Mark thought he could combine his ability for accurate illustration with his love for nature to create works in that style. And it also had something to do with needing to fill blank wall space. “It ultimately had to do with moving into a new house that had a lot of empty walls,” he laughs. “It was taking me 50 to 60 hours to complete a drawing that was 12 inches by 16 inches in size. These are faster.”

He bought a few canvases to try it out and everyone who saw them commented on their amazing colour. A successful show at a little gallery in Wilno convinced him that this style was the way forward for him.

Mark paints for four to five hours a day on average, and usually puts a few hours in first thing in the morning before he turns to anything else. “Then I feel guilty about not checking my email. So after a few hours I’ll flip my computer on and see what’s going on.” On that schedule, some of his larger pieces take two to three months to complete, the smaller ones two to three weeks.

Many of the animals depicted in his paintings appear ready to leap off the canvas, one of the elements he loves about this style. “You can really animate them. They can be sitting, running, perched, or lying and I can incorporate unlikely scenarios where I’ve got turtles and ravens together. I tend to lean toward realistic versions so you know what you’re looking at but there are more options for how I can fill a canvas with them and I can make up my own rules.”

Mark Kulas in his studio working on ‘Final Approach’

Mark’s guest this year – and for five years running – is potter Dan Hill from Wilno. “Each studio is left to their own to select their guests. I like Dan’s work and I have quite a few of his pieces. He stays at the cottage with us and we feed him. It’s an easy couple of days for him and (the guest artists) add variety to the tour, too.”

Because there are just seven stops on the tour, you can complete it within half a day and still have plenty of time to spend at each of the studios. And this year, in honour of the tour’s 10^th anniversary, you can pick up a passport at any of the studios, have it validated at each one you visit, and then leave it at the last one to be entered into a draw for one of seven artworks created by the artists.

It’s worth the trip. “We have some serious talent on our tour,” says Mark. “We all make each other look good.”

The tour runs Saturday and Sunday, August 13 and 14, from 10am to 5pm each day. Learn more about the other artists on the tour here.

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