Glen McMinn was 52 years old and feeling restless. Despite a thriving career as the founding partner and creative director of Halifax design firm Breakhouse, instead of enjoying his success, he found himself counting down the days, weeks and months until he would turn 64. The number chased him like a hangover in those years: It was the age both of McMinn’s parents had passed away from cancer when he was in his mid-twenties. Surely, he felt, it would mark the end of him, too.
“Like many people in my generation, you parked things,” McMinn says. “You didn’t necessarily talk about them… but in hindsight, part of my essence said I was going to die at 64.
“And when you start thinking in those terms, things start to fall off a bit.”
Today, McMinn is in a much better place: At age 57, he’s celebrating the launch of his first solo exhibition as a painter, a show called >64, with a series of works at the Dalhousie School of Architecture that includes a collaboration with hockey legend Ken Dryden. It’s a big moment for the Halifax-based artist. But the story of getting there is as colourful and paint-flecked as the canvases McMinn now brings to life.
Before Breakhouse—which is to say, before the smash success that would land the likes of Bell, Wind Mobile and Lawtons as retail design clients—McMinn was an Air Force kid and a die-hard Toronto Maple Leafs fan. (Still is.) Born and raised all over Southern Ontario—McMinn lived between Ottawa, Toronto, Burlington and London, as well as Quebec—he grew up with a father from a “different generation,” he says.
“When I was a kid in the ’70s, our fathers went to work every day and would drive you to hockey and all those things, but they were never overly emotional—and they weren’t overly affectionate.”
McMinn and his father would bond over two things: Which hockey team was better—his beloved Leafs or his father’s Montreal Canadiens—and a shared respect for who they saw as the “best goalie of his time.” For that, there was only one answer.
“We both agreed it was Ken Dryden,” McMinn tells The Coast.
Through painting, McMinn would eventually befriend Dryden—a Hockey Hall of Fame-inducted goaltender who won six Stanley Cups and five Vezina Trophies (awarded to the NHL’s best goaltender) in eight seasons and went on to become a lawyer, bestselling author and Canadian senator after his playing career. (“It’s surreal,” McMinn tells The Coast. “Imagine [your idol] calls you and says, ‘I’d love to do a project with you, and we’re going to become friends.’”)
But before meeting Dryden, McMinn would become an architect. And a designer—and then a wildly successful one. And then, he would hit bottom.
Truth be told, McMinn never really wanted to be an architect. He saw himself in film and television. In the 1990s, while completing his Bachelor and Master degrees at Dalhousie, a twenty-something McMinn found his way into Nova Scotia’s nascent screen industry. A painter who first picked up a brush in his “late teens,” he worked in the art departments for made-in-Halifax TV series like Catwalk and Emily of New Moon. (McMinn even earned a Gemini nod for his production design efforts on CBC’s Tucked Into Bedlam, a screen adaptation of comedic actor Tomáš Kubínek’s stage show, Bed.)
It was in those years that McMinn met a prop maker named Peter Wünsch. The two became friends—both worked in art departments for TV shows around Halifax—and, eventually, business partners. They picked up design gigs on the side of their jobs. That snowballed into co-founding a small design company, which—through luck and hard work—grew into a much bigger one.
“We realized we were a branding company,” McMinn told the Globe and Mail in 2012, “because we take care of everything—not just the experience, but the strategy around the experience, from designing everything from the packaging to the space itself.”
From 1999 until McMinn left Breakhouse in 2019, he helped build a client list that included the likes of Bell and Sobeys, along with local staples like Jane’s on the Common, Java Blend, EDNA and Stillwell.
But as McMinn’s career flourished, his inner world was pulling apart at the seams.
In the far corner of McMinn’s exhibition at the School of Architecture, next to a pair of painted goaltender masks, there’s a measuring tape affixed to the wall. A ballpoint pen and Sharpie are attached to the tape, at the 52- and 64-inch marks. For McMinn, those numbers became like a heavy pair of skates he couldn’t pull off, or a canvas he couldn’t set straight. Twelve years to live. A clock tick-tick-ticking without end. He skirts around the word “depression,” using his fingers as air quotes—the label doesn’t quite feel right, he says. Instead, McMinn summons Hamlet.
“You know, ‘To be or not to be?’” he asks. “It was existential. I was having a hard time with the existential part of what was going on around me—what I was doing … I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize who I was anymore.
“Hindsight is 20/20, but I think for anybody who creates any sort of company that is a big part of their passion… as it grows, you start losing what you love to do the most,” McMinn adds. “I’ve lived a very good life, and I got to do a lot of great things [at Breakhouse] until the day I left, but I think [a change] was overdue in my life.”
In the depths of McMinn’s darker days, a good friend paid him a visit. He brought a measuring tape with him. Then, he told McMinn to think of every inch on the ruler as a year of his life.
“He said, ‘I want you to look at all that you’ve lived, and how much you think you have left. Have you done the things you always wanted to do? Because according to you, you don’t have much time.’
“He said, ‘I want you to look at all that you’ve lived, and how much you think you have left. Have you done the things you always wanted to do? Because according to you, you don’t have much time.’”
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“It went through me—like, holy fuck—and stuck with me.”
What came after is one of the paintings McMinn is most proud of: A self-portrait of the artist, arms folded over a paint-spattered Leafs t-shirt. He shared it on Instagram and described it as “finding goodness beyond sadness.”
The response, he says, was “unbelievable.” Friends, colleagues, all kinds of people reached out and offered encouragement.
“When we step into things, sometimes we don’t know. I was sincerely petrified to share anything, because I was feeling pretty low,” McMinn says. “But I was like, ‘I just need to do this for myself.’ And that kind of changed everything.”
It also brought him face-to-face with one of his biggest heroes.
About Dryden. The two were introduced through a mutual friend after McMinn began his second life as a painter. He’d been painting and posting his hockey tableaus on Instagram—gloves, mostly, but also hockey sticks and equipment bags—which piqued the friend’s interest enough to set up a chat with the goaltending great. (“My friend said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in painting one of Ken’s gloves?’ And I’m like, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’”) First, though, Dryden needed to take McMinn’s measure.
“[Ken] said it was important that he knew I was serious. And I’m very serious. I’m also not so serious—but for this, I was,” McMinn tells The Coast.
The two chatted by phone for an hour and a half. Discussed ideas. They settled on a portrait project featuring Dryden’s old goalie mask—a piece of hockey history McMinn describes in one word: “Priceless.” (The most expensive goalie mask to date, a game-worn mask from Hendrik Lundqvist’s 2015-16 New York Rangers season, sold for US $135,000. McMinn figures Dryden’s mask, should the hockey great ever sell it, would fetch “$500,000, a million bucks, I don’t know.” He’s probably right.)
Thus began a partnership that McMinn still can’t quite believe.
“He didn’t have to do this,” McMinn says, of his collaboration with Dryden. “He knows that he has a lot of cachet... but he trusted me. He’s a gentleman, through and through.”
When you wander through McMinn’s >64 exhibition at the School of Architecture, three throughlines stand out: Family, legacy and hockey. All of the works are paintings McMinn has completed since 2019. You’ll see the self-portraits, the odes to the game—the Habs middle finger, Dryden’s goaltender mask—along with portraits of McMinn’s wife and son. There are hockey gloves. Frozen rinks. Busted lips. Distilled snapshots of life.
It’s a short-lived exhibition: It runs until Saturday, Jan. 27. But for an artist who used to obsess over time, McMinn is happy with what he’s got.
“I don’t want to sound cliche, but I don’t know how else to say it any better: Life is so fucking short. And you’ve got to do your best to be as happy as you can—and make the people around you happy, too.”
