Artist Shelli Walters has loved wildlife and making art since she was a child. The two come together in her August show, “The Peace of Wild Things,” featuring 10 mixed-media paintings inspired by the Wendell Berry poem of the same name. It opens with a reception during First Friday Gallery Walk at Tumalo Art Company, where Walters is a member of the collective studio.

Q: How did you get your start as an artist? Did you have artistic parents?

A: No. Nobody in my family knows where it came from. … I draw a lot and painted a lot as a kid, and was always in art classes in school, and always figured I’d be a fine artist. Somewhere along the way I discovered graphic design and fell in love with that. … I work for DVA Advertising. I really found a passion for that and made a career out of that and always figured I’d come back to my fine art at some point. I kept my fingers in it throughout, but when I turned 40, it made me realize how fast time goes by, and so it really lit a fire to get back into painting. … I dedicate my weekends to painting. I’m pretty 
protective of that time. I really look forward to it, and it really rejuvenates me. It just kind of puts some soul back in.

Q: Tell me about this wildlife-inspired show.

A: I had run across the image of a mountain goat in a magazine and I remembered the poem “The Peace of Wild Things.” I tore that out of the magazine and wrote the title, “The Peace of Wild Things 2017,” and tacked it up on my studio wall. … That’s where the germ of the idea came from. I had done some small pieces of animals, but I hadn’t tried it in a larger format, so it was really fun to scale them up. … It’s still in my mixed-media style, acrylic paint and collage. They’re very iconic, highly textural, and I chose to portray each animal as an individual. They all have a strong connection to the earth in the negative and positive balance of the compositions, just to try to suggest balance and harmony and the sense of oneness, maybe even the sense of having a one-on-one encounter.

Q: Have you had any one-on-one encounters with wildlife?

A: Yeah, living in Oregon, we’re lucky to be surrounded so many beautiful wild things. … Looking at the body of work, I’ve had encounters with almost all of them. One of my earliest encounters is when I was 7 or 8 years old. I was with my best friend, playing in woods behind her house. We suddenly found ourselves surrounded by a herd of elk. Looking back, we were probably lucky we weren’t killed, but there was a big stump that we happened to be able to crawl on top of while this big herd of elk just enveloped us and passed by.

Q: What do you hope people who take in your show leave thinking about or feeling?

A: I hope it brings an awareness for them if they are out in nature to pay attention to what’s going on around them. … I love how if I get lucky enough to get a glimpse of wildlife, how it just immediately takes me out of whatever I’m thinking about and brings me into the present. I just become mesmerized by their presence and watching them. … I hope it brings an awareness to people to watch for that. I really feel like I was put here on earth to create art, and my hope is that my art will bring joy into people’s lives.