iN PHOTOS: Okanagan pet portraitist creates emotional works of art

A West Kelowna artist has found her artistic niche by creating pet portraits. Valerie Duerden-Vallieren, 35, creates portraits of animals filled with colour, expressive features and splashes of paint across the canvas. She picked up drawing pencil at the age 10, a paint brush when she was 15 and started to take her art seriously at 17. She wants to create art that speaks to the soul, something people can connect with and feel an emotional attachment to. “I love making people happy, and if my art can bring a little happiness or any emotion they want to feel when they look at a piece I’ve created, then mission accomplished,” Duerden-Vallieren told iNFOnews.ca. “It’s so fun to see how different everyone feels about the same piece.” Duerden-Vallieren said when the customer sees a portrait of their pet, they’re usually overwhelmed with emotion and tears are often involved. In one instance, she painted a portrait for someone who had lost her dog. “I surprised her with a pet portrait, and when she opened it, she just started crying and she was super emotional. It really meant a lot to her to actually have a really good memory of a dog and she could just frame it and put it on her wall and have it forever.” Duerden-Vallieren does her best to capture the spirit of their pet so their owner can keep a connection forever. She takes pride in the eyes she paints saying the eyes can show the spirit and personality of the pet, which just builds the emotional relationship in the piece. It usually takes between two and five hours to create a pet portrait and after the final brush stroke she likes to take extra paint and splatter the painting with colours. “I feel like that's what brings it together at the end, when it just looks realistic and then I just go all crazy and I just put some splatters on it. That's what brings it all together for me,” she said.  Duerden-Vallieren isn’t worried about her style fitting in with everyone else’s. She likes what she does and takes pride in her colourful, splatter-filled pet portraits. She likes to make people feel happy, emotional and truly connected to their piece. “Art is very free, open-minded. So if somebody doesn't like it, then somebody else will,” she said. More of Duerden-Vallieren's work can be viewed and commission's can be requested through her Veesual Arts Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566884095118 . To contact a reporter for this story, email Bailey Zimmer mailto:bzimmer@infonews.ca  or call 250-808-0143 or email the editor mailto:news@infonews.ca . You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom mailto:tips@infonews.ca  and be entered to win a monthly prize draw. We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. SUBSCRIBE to our awesome newsletter here https://infotel.ca/newsletter . Find our Journalism Ethics policy here. http://infotel.ca/newsitem/code-of-ethics/it106782