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The blood and the paint had barely dried when Gertrude Kearns was asked to turn her eyes from Afghanistan and cast them back nearly 200 years, to another key conflict in Canadian history.

Fresh from a stint as a Defence Department artist in Kandahar in 2006, during which she helped mop up soldiers' blood after a suicide bombing killed diplomat Glyn Berry, Ms. Kearns was commissioned for a far different duty: to paint Tecumseh and Brock, the Shawnee Indian leader and British major-general who fought to keep Canada out of American hands in the War of 1812.

Jarring as the shift was, Ms. Kearns was no novice in the art of war, particularly in exploring "that existential line that soldiers walk. It's about conflict and conscience, as someone once said."

Tecumseh and Brock fought in a different era under different conditions for a different purpose, but when their portraits are unveiled tonight at the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto, astute viewers will see the same complexity that Ms. Kearns typically divines from her contemporary subjects.

"That's the excitement for me, realizing a point that's open for interpretation," Ms. Kearns said in her Toronto studio, in a house where Margaret Atwood once lived. "And I don't really care what happens after that."

The soft-spoken 57-year-old, who grew up trying to interpret the tumult of the 1960s, was referring to the controversy that followed some of her more recent works.

In 2005, veterans groups complained when the Canadian War Museum decided to display Somalia #2, Without Conscience, which depicts the torture of Shidane Arone by a Canadian soldier. The Somali teen's death led to the disbanding of the Airborne Regiment.

Disquiet also greeted Keep the Peace or I'll Kill You, a poster bearing those words around an image of Major-General Lewis Mackenzie, and a series of paintings of an anguished Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, who led the woefully understaffed United Nations peacekeeping mission to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.

"It wasn't a ploy on my part," Ms. Kearns said of her intentions. "The last thing I do is something that's going to cause a public sensation. They have to cause a sensation within me, and that's where it stops."

That the Department of Defence invited her to document the Afghanistan mission despite these minor tempests reassured her that military commanders "got it," even if some in the wider public did not.

"When they know where you're coming from and they know that you know what soldiering and defence are about, they're comfortable," Ms. Kearns said.

And so, there were compliments rather than complaints from Colonel Steve Noonan, then-commander of Canada's forces in Afghanistan, when she made a poster of his face flanked by the words, Planning from the Front, Leading from the Rear.

In their conventional context, those would be fighting words to any self-respecting military leader. But Col. Noonan knew exactly what Ms. Kearns was trying to convey - that the unique challenges of the Afghan theatre demanded a different approach; that he "created a working concept out of a derogatory thing."

While more subtle, the portraits of Tecumseh and Brock, both killed in battle, carry similarly nuanced messages.

"I knew the expectation in general would be to do the tough warrior," she said of the Tecumseh piece, which the institute commissioned alone before it realized a companion portrait of Brock was essential due to the leaders' close and crucial association. "But there's so much more about [Tecumseh]; the humane warrior, the poet. I wanted to show the sense of concern and despair as well."

And so, while his left hand - "the measured hand of a statesman," Ms. Kearns called it - cradles a musket, his right is clenched in a fist and upturned, representing "what he's trying to hold on to and what he wants to attain" not just for the Shawnee, but for all first nations. "And I thought it would connect well with what is going on today."

Brock, more controlled and confident with the might of the empire behind him, holds an Indian war club and wears a sash given him by Tecumseh, while his left hand, sinewed and solid, grips the hilt of his sword.

Ms. Kearns acknowledged the challenge of trying to capture the essence of long-dead historical figures, with only the portraits of previous artists to rely on. "It's all supposition," she said. But then, she has seen enough contemporary subjects to know there can be limits around anyone's truth, alive or dead.

"Sometimes that core is the hardest thing to see, for any of us."