Scott Nolan’s two latest books, Man on a Wheel: A Tribute to Patrick O’Connell and Nolanville, are extensions of the ethos by which he lives. 

“Art is an ocean right outside my door. Every day. I don’t go out and toil and drive myself crazy for [art],” says the Winnipeg singer-songwriter, music producer, poet, and visual artist. “It comes to me constantly because I’ve chosen to pay attention to it. It’s everywhere I look.”

Man on a Wheel brings together 13 of Nolan’s collages (plus the cover image) selected from over 300; the lyrics to eight songs he adapted from Patrick O’Connell’s poems; “Boz and Molly (A Romance)” by O’Connell; an insightful introduction by poet Catherine Hunter (which Nolan says is his favourite part of the book); and a CD containing a recording of the songs as well as a rare recording of O’Connell reading the final piece. 

O’Connell was an acclaimed Winnipeg poet who published three full-length books and two chapbooks between 1990 and 2004. 

Nolan is drawn to O’Connell’s poems not only because of their friendship, but also because his poems were, as Nolan says, “life or death. That’s the difference between him and almost every other poet I’ve read. It [his work] was truly life or death, the way Vincent Van Gogh’s work was life or death.”

Nolan was mentored throughout his adolescence by his cousin, Patrick Nolan, who was a self-taught poet doing a life sentence in Folsom Prison. 

“This is where [my] awareness and consciousness of poetry began, and it was largely prison poetry and that eventually segued into my meeting Patrick O’Connell,” he says. “It was unique, at this young age when I was really just starting, I met these two Irish writers named Patrick, and the purpose of their writing was survival.”

O’Connell, together with Nolan’s cousin, taught Nolan that “art can be your identity, can be your culture, can be your religion, can be your higher power.” 

In adapting O’Connell’s poems, Nolan says his process was similar to the way he goes about creating collages: “I went to his published works, and I read them over and over until I began hearing songs and then, interestingly, it was the same process I would use later for the collages. 

“I would just simply cut and paste and try to see a compelling image or sentiment and see if I could alter the perspective of it, give a different angle or a different view, change the colour, change the light.”

The connection between art, survival, and health comes up over and over for Nolan. He started writing poems to quit smoking. 

“I was determined, every day I would walk myself to freedom,” he explains. “And that very first day, a poem came to me as I walked, something about the shuffling of my feet and the intensity of trying to not think about cigarettes. And this happened every day.

“Art has always been a processing thing for me. I started to tune into the idea that the opposite of depression is expression.”

Nolan started doing collages in 2020, for similar reasons to those that led him to write poetry. 

“My partner of many, many years left suddenly and COVID, the lockdowns, were like a week away, and I’d been having renovations done in my home, and I sat staring at a National Geographic, and I was anxious and struggling, and the cutting and pasting was really just a survival mechanism,” he explains. 

Nearly all of Nolan’s collages are made using National Geographic magazines, and while he approaches the source material with a sense of intentionality and responsibility, he tries to let the process work through his unconscious. 

“I think it’s letting myself just kind of dive in and still be harnessed a little bit,” he says. “I was uncomfortable with using people’s images, particularly children’s, and I wanted to be very cautious about cultures outside my own. And so that probably tethered me a little bit between conscious and unconscious states.”

His book Nolanville, a collection of his collages of unique, somewhat surreal scenes of nature, gritty urban streets, and even a kind of cowboy life, is not named after the real place in Texas – it’s more of a representation of the inner life of an artist. 

“Much of my life I’ve been accused of living in my own little world,” says Nolan, “and I realize that some of the time it’s not meant as a compliment. In fact, a lot of times that it’s been said to me, I recognize that the tone isn’t meant to be flattering, and I like to joke that that world, I call it Nolanville.”

Nolan’s work is occupied with the question of what it means to be an artist, and he wants to share what he’s learned in as many media as possible, from songwriting to visual art, to an unpublished web series. 

“The artist’s life is really very interesting to me,” he says. “I’ve never had a desire to live one way and be stuck in one thing. You want to grow and evolve, and I feel lucky to have been pulled into this way of living for whatever reason.”