My work is not just on the exterior of reality but it's more like beyond reality.

To be able to give a sense of a place where we have amazing energy and love.

Everyone has a special place.

Something inside us no one can take.

So I think if I really work my special place, I will connect it with another person who really have special places of their own.

Once dubbed, “The town so nice, they named it twice,” Walla Walla gets its name from “the people of many waters,” one of the many tribes that first inhabited the Columbia Plateau.

The region is famously fertile, witnessed in the wealth of crops including wheat, onions, and wine grapes.

But it's the expansive beauty of this rolling landscape that thrills artist Keiko Hara, who has live and painted here for 40 years, half of those as an art professor at Whitman College.

Born in Japan during Worl War II, Hara moved to the U.S. in the 1970s.

Now, she spends much of her time on the site of the former Walla Walla Army Air Base, which trained World War II bomber crews.

The hangars, barracks and bunkers have been repurposed in her case as storage for oil paintings.

This is a kind of perfect moisture control, and you can really keep artworks perfect condition.

- How does it feel to have your art stored in a place of war?

That's great!

I wish I have a more bigger bunker.

- And you had it fitted out for paintings?

- Painting and prints, and it's really kept a very nice way.

- Yeah, well, you can feel the cold air pouring out of here as we stand.

-I know!

And from here, you get this great view also.

- Oh, yes.

- Of the hills.

It's just amazing.

Instead of going to beach, I just go drive through the wheat field.

- And was this the kind of thing you saw and were drawn to when you first moved to Walla Walla?

- Yes.

I saw the 360 degree skies and I thought, “Maybe I can make a big painting here.” Among the old barracks is Hara's studio, where she comes each morning t dig in to her daily practice translating memories and emotions into vivid, large-scale works.

The first thing in the morning I comes, I just look at the whole work each one, my little poem.

And the works is just doesn't really completed very quick.

I just, I have to look at it every day until I really feel, “Ah, okay.

This is I really wanted to say.” - When you look over at this current in-progress work today, what are you feeling like you need to work more on?

- Just right now, each canvas are not really balanced, and I have to really work with the colors and the surface.

And, the shapes.

And just, interest.

- Yeah.

- And it's very exciting.

Every day I can really explore what I can do with it.

Hara studied figurativ painting at art school in Japan, but was drawn to the abstract art movement in the U.S.

Her lucky break came when another artist dropped out of an exhibition.

Hara was able to show and sell her abstract paintings of the Sakurajima volcano, earning enough money to emigrate.

So I'm curious about your use of bold, so many bold colors.

-Yeah!

- And are those coming from your local environment, what you're seeing here in Walla Walla?

Are they coming just from your mind, your emotion?

- I think mind.

The color, really speaks something.

And, I am not really looking for the color represent something.

But it's something I am working with the content.

How the color works with my content.

Art is just like, some much potential to really work with sense of place or feelings and, hope, dream.

So, I am so into it because it's kind of, I can always find a new way to look at life itself also.

- Yeah.

Her continuing astonishment by the oceanic fields and layered vistas is reflected in her Topophilia series, a name that means “love of place.” She aims to capture this not literally, but sensually, through her paintings of the sea, glass panels, and mokuhanga prints, the last of which she creates by carving into long wooden planks.

Sometimes huge, these immersive works invite viewers to step inside and connect with their own relationship to closely held spaces.

- Those kind of sensories the human has ability to really expand beyond the actually things look like - Right.

- Or the reality.

It's beyond that.

So it's kind of meaningful life.

I want to have one.

So I don't want to just watching a tree.

You know?

And the sky.

It's beautiful, but it just go beyond just the tree and the sky.

Something, just, kind of those kind of environment give us amazing quality of life, and belief, and love, and something like, that's painting give me those kind of ability to connect with those aspect with another human being.

It's all something related.

- Right.

- Something just like, you know, “Wow.

The sky and land.

I am walking in the sky.” Just surprise to me that my sense, “Wow.

I am in the sky.” Having grown up near the Pacific Ocean, and crossed it, Hara has re-rooted herself in a rural plateau.

She landed here by chance, and now she's a poet of this place, expressing herself with a paintbrush.

Art by Northwest was made possible in part with the support of Visit Bellingham, Whatcom County.