Dutch muralist Nina Valkoff blesses troubled Chilliwack corner with wild ethereal feline splendour
The Chilliwack Mural Festival is more than an event, it can connect residents and visitors in sublime ways
August 4, 2026
A week after Dutch mural artist Nina Valkhoff began her piece on a wall on the east side of a one-storey retail building on the corner of Fletcher Street and Nowell Road, I stood outside the fence that surrounded the lot adjacent to the wall to take a picture of the completed work of art.
Nina's mural of a cougar in repose surrounded by blossoms in her realist style bursting with colour and whimsy is a visual oasis in one of the most inner-city blocks in downtown Chilliwack.
Day after day as she painted, a parade of troubled souls wandered to and from Ruth & Naomi’s Mission just metres away. Ambulances attended to possible overdoses, police and security dealt with disturbances, all as Nina moved her lift up and down, north and south along the wall creating her work of art as she has for 23 years in 16 countries around the world at 17 international street-art festivals.
Nina's website describes her art as a quiet form of activism – subtle ‘artivism’ – bringing wild nature into the heart of cities.
“By painting nature on big urban walls, Nina ensures that passersby encounter these creatures every day, sparking wonder, awareness, and, she hopes, a deeper respect for the natural world.”
Nina's painting is now complete, one of the earlier works ready in advance of the Chilliwack Mural Festival for which several other artists arrived to begin painting after she left on August 2.
Octopuses in the sky
As I stood by the chain-link fence to take a short video of her completed painting, a man walked up behind me and asked if I was “Mark.”
“No.”
He asked if I knew the artist. I told him I met her, we talked over a few days as I took time lapses of her at work.
I told the man she was from the Netherlands. He seemed relatively coherent, one of those nearby souls most likely homeless, almost certainly addicted individuals that frequent the area close to Ruth & Naomi’s.
“Where is The Netherlands?” he asked.
“In Europe.”
“Where in Europe?”
“Um, well, it's next to Germany.”
“Next to Germany?”
“Yes,” I said.
He then asked me if Nina spoke out against animal abuse. I thought and, having not read the ‘about’ page on her website yet, I said I didn’t know, but I know she is a vegetarian and loves animals.
Then his first of seemingly many non-sequiturs, he told me about his girlfriend who recently died. I asked her name and later learned that indeed yes, a 45-year-old woman by this name who suffered with addictions recently did die.
“I’ve done a lot of investigating,” he said. “A lot. I have no solid evidence but… there’s supposed to be a message here.”
“On this wall?” I asked.
“I’m supposed to keep looking at the wall,” he said, intently.
He paused.
“Octopuses,” another tangent I supposed. “Did you know that there are two octopuses in the sky?”
Me confused.
“There are two octopuses in the sky?” I asked.
“They’re in the sky,” he said.
“Oh. OK.”
“Ya,” he continued.
“It changes everything. Octopuses in the sky. I just saw it. I couldn’t see it. Then after she died, I really looked. They’re high-fiving each other. High-fiving in the sky.”
“Really?” I replied, confused but sensitive to a vulnerable, street-entrenched man starting at a fresh piece of art in his city, making connections to a personal tragedy, linking that to a possible delusion, I figured.
“Ya, it means something,” he said. “It’s fucking cool.”
Indeed.
He’s not wrong
All that is to say, downtown Chilliwack has become an incredible place in recent years with new businesses, restaurants, all orbiting around and amid the District 1881 redevelopment at Five Corners, itself dotted with dozens of world-class paintings by artists from around the globe as part of the Chilliwack Mural Festival’s footprint year after year.
The homelessness, poverty and unregulated drug problems remain.
Tourists come like never before to see what the Algra Bros. have created in the area and/or to see our city’s incredible murals and new businesses. Residents come to the area from across the city as well, and those who live in the area appreciate it all.
Amid all that newness, some intractable problems remain, the unfortunate people riven with those problems walk the streets and they are not blind to the newness. And to the art.
With up to a dozen new murals adorning new walls every year there is always something new to see, new visions to breathe in, new ideas to interpret, new creations to explore visually and intellectually. All of which have their own meanings to the artists, to the festival organizers and volunteers, to everyone who sees them from international visitors to neighbours to unhoused people struggling to live.
The mural festival doesn’t change everything or anything, really. But it does make everything a little bit better both for the moments in time while artists visit and work, then for the subsequent weeks, months and years.
The mural festival adds a spark of imagination to the City of Chilliwack, a flourish of beauty downtown, and a stark sometimes surprising vision allowing people from around the world and those sleeping among its walls to ponder something within, to think of a world elsewhere, to share of something “other.”
And the octopuses high-fiving as my mourning street person relayed, a seeming delusion while discussing a mural of a cougar? He was right. I didn’t know what he was talking about. On the south-facing wall on the corner of Kipp Avenue and Main Street is a mural of two octopuses touching tentacles, a “high five” indeed.
If we look around, listen to the people in our midst, we can literally learn something new every day.
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Paul J. Henderson
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