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Painting outer space

F or Karin Vengshoel, having her first-ever solo show at Coquitlam's Place des Arts will complete a circle.

For Karin Vengshoel, having her first-ever solo show at Coquitlam's Place des Arts will complete a circle.

As a child, the east Vancouver resident took classes at the Maillardville centre and, later in life, honed her ceramics and textile arts skills there.

"I feel a strong tie to the town and to the facility where I have done the majority of my learning and artistic experimentation in my youth," she said.

Her exhibit that will be on display - a two-and-a-half year body of work - is called Expansions and is comprised of 11 large-scale paintings plus six smaller ones inspired by images from Nasa's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes.

And the colours she re-creates of nebulae and galaxies in her oil and mixed media paintings are, simply put, out of this world.

She explains her palette this way: "The images we see from telescopes like Hubble are artificially coloured. Colours are assigned to specific elements and that makes the pretty pictures we see in some images. In others, the astronomer has simply enhanced the colour to differentiate it better, say for visual telescopic images.

"In some cases, I would simply work from the image that inspired me and mix my colours to best represent what I was seeing but in others, I chose a colour scheme that was more representative of the feeling of the work."

Vengshoel, an Emily Carr University of Art + Design student who studied at the Langley Fine Arts School, was introduced to stellar phenomena by her partner and "the scope and grandeur of these objects is absolutely amazing," she said.

"Also, the notion that when you're looking at something a huge distance away, you're looking backwards in time. That was kind of mind-bending."

But Vengshoel is also firmly grounded, donating part of her art sales proceeds to the Alzheimers Society of Canada - a salute to her grandfather, a prolific artist who died from complications from the illness in 2007.

"It is hard for me to watch the person who inspired me the most slowly stop painting because he could no longer remember how," she said. "I want to be able to support, in my own small way, research and education about this crippling disease."

Karin Vengshoel's Expansions can be seen in the Leonore Peyton Salon at Place des Arts (1120 Brunette Ave., Coquitlam) until Feb. 25.

The opening reception for her exhibit as well as Kwai Sang Wong's Where Imagination Meets Clay and Rachael Ashe's Transforming the Book will be held tomorrow (Jan. 5) at 7 p.m.

jwarren@tricitynews.com