Chris Walling claims she’s only doing it to pay her Visa bill, but the Tri-City watercolor artist has made a name for herself painting local landmarks and businesses, including many around Richland.

The Richland artist started painting more than 35 years ago with a goal of having 20 watercolors in her repertoire before she went public with sales.

“People always say, ‘Oh, you’re so talented.’ I mean, if you worked on this five days a week for 30 years, you’d hope you’d get better,” Walling laughed. “The talent is obstinacy, saying I am going to make this work.”

That stubbornness has borne originals, prints and high-quality magnets featuring scenes from Richland’s Art in the Park, Kennewick’s grain elevator and two images of the Moore Mansion – one in a dark, wintry scene and the other bright and in bloom.

All of her works available as prints and magnets feature outdoor scenes, whether in the dark with the neon lights of Lee’s Tahitian in Richland’s Uptown, the former bus barbershop in West Richland or the train engine parked in Pasco’s Volunteer Park.

Painting around town

Walling’s extensive level of detail requires 10 layers of paint and can take 80 hours to complete. To keep focused on her work, she often paints outside of her home studio.

“I go to Starbucks, down to Stone Soup, Ethos or to Denny’s,” she said. “I just need to get out of the house because there’s too much crap here that will distract me. I can doomscroll and play solitaire unendingly, and if I’m out of the house with the stuff in my hand, it’s a little harder for me to do, and that just works better for my process.”

When she was starting out, Walling set goals for herself. “For the first year, I said at least five days a week I’m going to do something with my art, even if it just meant balancing my art checkbook or emptying the garbage can in the studio.”

Painting is a skill she grew into after happening upon an oil-painting class while at a resort that offered activities as part of your stay. “I’m like, ‘Heck, I’ll try anything,’” Walling said, and signed up. Turns out she was pretty good, even though she says she can’t draw.

“Here’s the deal, I really like watercolor, and I had no idea I could do it. My oil painting was pretty good and so I did one the next day, and by the time we got home, I was like, ‘Well forget oils, I’m going to do watercolors and find classes or something.’”

Primarily self-taught, artist Chris Walling is known for her vibrant and detailed watercolors of landmarks throughout the Tri-Cities.

| Photo by Robin Wojtanik

Sausage Fest scene

A magnet version of her image of Christ the King’s Sausage Fest, painted more than 25 years ago, was sold at the recent community event in honor of one of the people painted into the crowd scene – longtime parishioner Kevin Ghirardo.

Ghirardo died in early June, but he and his wife, Helen, were the intended recipients of the original work when Walling created it for her neighbors decades ago.

“Helen was always my go-to if I needed help with the kids, she would say, ‘Just bring them over.’ It was never reciprocal because they have a million relatives (to babysit), so I thought, ‘OK, fine, I’m just going to put them in this and give them the painting.’ I didn’t even know if they liked my stuff, and frankly, I didn’t care, I thought they could give it to the school or the church or they can do whatever they want – but they’re getting it,” Walling laughed.

The Sausage Fest scene includes Helen pushing a stroller, as Walling always saw her doing at that time, and a younger Monsignor Thomas Champoux, eating a piece of pie. Prints of this image, and others, are popular sellers at the annual Art in the Park held each July and holiday bazaars, where they go for $35.

Adding to inventory

Walling’s original intent at events like those was to have six images from each of the three cities. She accomplished that and has added to her inventory, most recently with the riverboat that docks at Richland’s Howard Amon Park in the summer, Richland’s Gallery at the Park and the Richland’s Octopus’ Garden, complete with store owner Gus Sako.

An untrained eye might miss the detail and intention behind her paintings.

“You figure out what the focal point is, and for that one, it’s Gus, because Gus is Octopus’ Garden. He is very deliberate, and his shirt is very deliberate. The woman walking into the painting from the left is Tina from the bakery next door because I want your eye to go there and there are girls on bikes on the right-hand side are facing in who are basically arrows; if you start looking at things, I want you to move your eyes around the painting,” she said.

Walling’s pieces tend to be Richland-centric because that’s where she lives and what she sees the most. “It has so much character, especially the Uptown, and now its murals,” she said.

She said Sako wasn’t convinced she could make the building translate into watercolor.

“I told him I can make really (expletive) old buildings look really good in watercolor,” Walling laughed. Sako now carries the magnet version of this piece and other Tri-City scenes at his quirky shop along George Washington Way.

Chris Walling’s painting of Zip’s Drive-in is among the Tri-City landmarks she paints.

| Courtesy Chris Walling

Commissioned, accessible art

Walling also works on commission, charging $165 for an original, framed 11-by-14 watercolor painted from a printed photo. She’s currently painting one of Kennewick’s Texas Roadhouse for a couple who met online and went there for dinner on their first date. She’s detailing the image to include their cars, since that was how each person knew the other had arrived.

The painter says she can’t complete a piece in one sitting. She dips in and out.

“There’s a lot of adjustment because you get something in there and then you have to go, ‘OK does that pull your eye too much this way?’ The Gallery in the Park took me about four to six weeks for that piece and it sort of overlapped some while I worked on the riverboat for quite a while. I had to stop because I was going to wreck it if I kept going,” Walling said. This process takes time and requires meticulous detail.

“People don’t understand the process, because how would they? And that’s another reason I paint out in public, to make art accessible. When I paint from photographs, I have to adjust them so everything’s proportionate,” she said. “For example, if you take a photo of a house or a building and you look at the photo if you look at the vertical lines on the building if it’s a two-story house those lines are going to slant as you look up because you’re down. You don’t think much of that when it’s a photograph, but you can’t do it that way when it’s a painting because it looks wrong. All of the vertical lines have to be parallel.”

Walling also dabbles in some cut straw designs, mostly nativity scenes, displayed in a shadow box. These pieces run about $425. She also creates collages and watercolors over poured acrylic.

“You pour that stuff and wait and watch as you tilt it, and it rolls together. The chemicals in it make bubbles come up and the things slide together,” she said.

She created the magnets to make art accessible; they sell for just $7 at Octopus’ Garden.

Her works are also available through her website, chriswalling.com, at Consuelo Soto Murphy’s gallery in Richland and at Optical Accents, a Richland optometrist who requested to carry them.

Walling will be at the holiday bazaars scheduled at Badger Mountain Elementary and Hanford High School this fall.