Summer storms come to the Nelson Library in Munro art show
By Contributor
Brush meets bluster in a series of colourful, weather-inspired acrylic landscapes by Yvonne Vanens Munro, now showing at the Nelson Library. It’s a dramatic exhibition that celebrates the power of nature in the Kootenays.
When Munro was six months old her parents, recently emigrated from Holland, drove from Nova Scotia to British Columbia in a Volkswagen truck with a bottle warmer. The truck broke down in Nelson, where Munro and her mother stayed for six weeks while her father carried on to the West Coast to find work and a home.
Munro was raised on the coast with two sisters and a brother, in what she describes as a rough and tumble, tumultuous childhood. There, when she wasn’t exploring the woods at the foot of the Garibaldi mountains, she drew. In high school and college, she says, “art class was my little place of peace, away from the angst of growing up.”
As an adult, Yvonne returned to the Kootenays with her family, where her own two kids enjoyed a rough and tumble, tumultuous childhood. She took classes through the Oxygen Centre and the Kootenay School of Arts. “Studying Art is fantastic,” she says, “but painting is the best way to become a painter.”
About this exhibition, Munro explains, “I want to celebrate the Kootenays and mountain weather with this show. So I took the Osprey across the Kootenay Lake with my camera and took several hundred pictures. These paintings are the result.”
Munro is one of four Nelson Public Library bookmark artists, along with Lainey Benson, Rick Foulger, and Keira Zaslove. Bookmarks are available at the Library. Munro’s exhibition continues through July and August.
