Some painters use a small canvas for their work, but for others – no wall is big enough. Such are Ola Volo’s murals. Larger than life, her work has been painted on numerous walls (inside and out), with collaborations with clients as big as Starbucks, Louis Vuitton, Lululemon, and Volkswagen.
The Kazakhstan-born, Vancouver-raised painter blends together animals, people, architecture, and nature, creating rich paintings that tell the story of her background.
“Growing up in Kazakhstan at my grandparents’ farm, my grandparents would put on records and we would just listen to folktale stories,” said
Volo in an interview with CBC. “I spent a lot of time kind of getting swept away into a different world.”
“The bigger the wall, the more of a voice it has,” she added. “It is an imagined world that I create of Russian and Kazakh and Polish stories, and the minute I started doing the artwork on walls it became larger than me.”
Check out some of her larger than life creations in the gallery below.
