Ola Volo’s murals really pack a punch. The Kazakhstan-born, Vancouver-raised painter and muralist has a distinctive artistic style that draws from history, multiculturalism, and folklore.
Bringing her background, tradition, and history along with her, her paintings have an air of fantasy about them, mixing together animals, people, architecture, and nature to articulate diverse stories rich with symbolism.
“Growing up in Kazakhstan at my grandparents’ farm, my grandparents would put on records and we would just listen to folktale stories,” she recalled in an interview with CBC. “I spent a lot of time kind of getting swept away into a different world.”
Her work is widely recognized for its inventiveness and imaginative gesture, and her murals work to transform public realms and outdoor spaces. “The bigger the wall, the more of a voice it has,” said Volo. “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.”
With clients that include Starbucks, Louis Vuitton, Lululemon, and Volkswagen, the sky is truly the limit for this talented creative.
