Nick MacIntosh sits in front of a laptop in Starbucks and navigates to a Facebook album that serves as his portfolio. Although it’s a -22°C afternoon in January, the Yellowknifer is wearing a light jacket and sneakers, his long hair tied back under a baseball cap. He’d rather not talk about his art, preferring to just let people look at his cheeky, unconventional paintings of the North. “It’s funny, people want to interview artists all the time,” he says. “But artists express themselves with their art, which means they’re not great at articulating their thoughts.”
Offering an online gallery tour, he browses through photos. One is his twist on Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, a painting from the early 1900s with two embracing figures entwined in golden robes. MacIntosh’s version shows the lovers holding each other inside a sleeping bag, donning toques and rubber-duck pajamas. In other works, he’s painted Chewbacca taking a selfie in downtown Yellowknife, the Gold Range Hotel as a comic book cover and the crash site of a radioactive Russian satellite near Great Slave Lake.
MacIntosh tries to push the boundaries of northern art beyond landscapes and wildlife. “I don’t think we should be doomed or condemned by traditional archetypal themes,” he says, adding that the only thing that really defines northern art is that it’s made by Northerners.
When MacIntosh was a toddler, his family moved to Cambridge Bay from Kingston, Ontario, and eventually settled in Yellowknife in 1983. Growing up, he drew on everything, including his bed sheets and the inside covers of books. As a teenager, he dreamed of becoming a comic book artist.
At art school in Alberta, he developed an interest in painting, and when he returned to Yellowknife, he wanted to find a way to be a relevant northern artist while staying true to his interests—pop culture, comic books, movies and television. MacIntosh often riffs on lesser-known aspects of northern life, such as the Harley riders who congregate in the Tim Hortons parking lot. “It’s northern,” he says, “but you kind of have to know to get it.”
He flips to a photo of his painting of Superman walking down Lois Lane, a residential street in Yellowknife. “This is kind of a fun one,” he says with a grin. Most people think Lois Lane gets its name solely from Yellowknife-born Margot Kidder, the who played the Superman character. But the road was also named after Lois Little, who lived on the street. Little was Facebook friends with Kidder and sent her a photo of the painting, which prompted the actor to send the artist a friend request. “I was thrilled,” MacIntosh says, “being a comic nerd and growing up with those Superman movies.”
His artistic journey hasn’t always been easy. To make a living, he works as a correctional officer at the Yellowknife jail, and he describes the public reaction to his art as “love it or hate it.” About a decade ago, he tried painting landscapes, partly due to creative fatigue. “I call this my selling-out period,” he says. The experiment did not go well. It was obvious his heart wasn’t in the work, and it was difficult to sell. Getting back to what he loved, he put on a 2022 horror-themed show with paintings of ghosts and monsters in northern settings. Selling a lot of the art felt like redemption.
Now 50, MacInmtosh doesn’t try quite so hard to be different. He even wonders if the current he’s been fighting ever existed. “There’s so much interference and static and insecurities that go on in an artist’s brain,” he says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “It’s hard to put into words. That’s why I paint.”
