For the last few years, John Hartman has looked down at Canada from helicopters, planes and drones. He took photos of snow-topped Rocky Mountains, coastal Newfoundland towns, the foggy beach at Tofino, B.C., tightly packed cities. Then he painted each landscape behind the author who loved it. Of the more than 30 in his cross-country portrait project, only one writer chose the great indoors.

Hartman laughs. “Generation X” author Douglas Coupland.

“I thought, oh goodness, Doug wants to be ironic, but it turns out he wasn’t,” he says. Park Royal, a mall in West Vancouver, was where 14-year-old Coupland cleared syrup-sticky plates at Ricky’s Pancake House for his first job. “He had a real attachment to it and interest in its strange architecture and how it changed over time.”

Hartman is known for his landscape work, and in 2014, he was working on a series of portraits connected to the shoreline of Ontario’s Georgian Bay. He approached writer David Macfarlane for that series, but Macfarlane surprised him by suggesting a different background: his childhood backyard in Hamilton.

So Hartman visited the Macfarlane family home and talked to the author about his connection to the city, and painted the portrait.

Hartman is a big reader, especially of Canadian fiction, and decided there might be a larger project in this. He started emailing Canadian writers to see if they would be up for a portrait series connected to place, and if so, what landscape was most important to them? He had friends help him draft a list of authors to approach, and then he travelled the country, meeting people and creating the sweeping canvases in his studio in Lafontaine, Ont.

Last year, he published 32 of the portraits in a book called “Many Lives Mark This Place.” An exhibit of the work begins at the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg on March 7.

Initially, he was going to publish a book version of the project that was more of an exhibition catalogue, but the scope changed after he asked Globe and Mail journalist and “The Boy in the Moon” author Ian Brown for more details about why Go Home Bay was important to him. Brown’s emailed reply nearly had Hartman in tears — that it was a place where his son Walker, who was born with a “shockingly rare genetic syndrome,” could be himself.

It seemed obvious in hindsight, he says, so after that, Hartman asked each author to write about 500 words to accompany each portrait.

In these short essays, you learn that Michael Crummey and Michael Winter live next door to each other in Newfoundland’s Western Bay, a place that is something of a “black hole” for cellphone coverage, as Crummey writes. When Winter arrives each summer, Crummey poaches his Wi-Fi from an upstairs corner of his own home.

“And that feels like just about the right level of ‘connectedness,” Crummey writes of his community, which has long felt “next door to the modern world.”

Hartman was surprised by some of the places authors chose. He figured Thomas King, author of “The Inconvenient Indian,” would pick the rural area around Lethbridge, which in Hartman’s mind was the setting for King’s “Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour” series on CBC. But King wanted Tofino, in all of its wet, gloomy melancholy.

“When I’m feeling strong and invincible, I go to the Prairies and stand in the sun,” King writes in his piece, later adding: “Whereas the coast is a lonely refuge, a soft blanket, a gentle lover.”

It was a new landscape for Hartman, and he loved capturing the misty, overcast light.

While many writers lived in cities, they often chose rural places where they grew up, or a town where they lived in the summer. Hartman was delighted when Camilla Gibb chose Toronto’s Kensington Market, “Because at one point it looked like there were going to be no cities in the paintings at all,” he says.

As part of his process, he met every author and took their photograph indoors from different angles. It usually took 10 minutes for people to relax as they talked about why a place mattered to them. (If he had time, he did a watercolour sketch.) Then he would visit the place, take photos, make sketches. Later, he combined the images with oil paints on a large linen canvas in his studio.

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Hartman covered the travel on his own. He has a drone, but height and other restrictions meant that occasionally he had to charter a small airplane to get the bird’s-eye view he wanted to convey in each painting. (He likes a Cessna; the wings don’t block the view.)

Once a pilot phoned in sick in Calgary and he had to rent a helicopter at the last minute to fly above the foothills west of Cochrane to capture the sweeping landscape that meant so much to “Good to a Fault” author Marina Endicott. “The mountains are good, but there’s a lot to be said for their preamble, the foothills, as they rise step by step into the great magnificence,” she writes.

The pilots and other people he met along the way were intrigued by the project. When he was driving home from Massachusetts, where he had photographed “A Tale for the Time Being” author Ruth Ozeki (who he painted above B.C.’s Cortes Island), the border agent wanted to know everything — including which authors Hartman had spoken to. “Obviously this guy was a reader,” he says. “I finally had to say, I’d like to try to get home before dark.”