Vahala: love for the natural world

Mirja Vahala’s love for the natural world come together in an exhibition of landscape paintings this month at Cedar Creek Café in Winlaw.

Continuing until Oct. 23, Vahala’s  majestic rock of Wapta Mountain soaring to the sky, an elk fleeing a storm in a magical land and a young mountain goat shedding for summer will be some of the works on the walls of the café. 

Ideas for Vahala’s landscape paintings come to her from our common well of human experiences: how we relate to time, to change, and to mortality. Walking with her husband and dogs in the West Kootenay outdoors, she sees stories in the surrounding landscape.

In her imagination Vahala sees a tree, touched by a passing meteor, transformed into a glow of light in the night-time forest. With this image in her mind, she is inspired to paint.

Mirja Vahala has lived in Castlegar for over four years.  During that time she has established Inspiring Minds Fine Art, has displayed her artwork at Windborne B&B, at the Kootenay Gallery, Rouge Gallery and Fisher Peak Art Gallery to name a few.

She has taught hundreds of students via Selkirk College and Inspiring Minds Fine Art over the past seven years.