Deb Van Poolen

Deb Van Poolen has been a landscape painter for thirty years, exhibiting her work in Washington DC, Oregon, Montana, Michigan and the West Bank of Palestine. Deb became an artist so that she could spend time focusing on the beauty of nature. Deb paints in watercolor, oil and acrylic.

Deb’s recent series of seven large paintings integrate science and art. Five of the seven paintings feature butterflies, birds, fish and plants of the globally significant biodiversity present where the Cascade, Siskiyou and Klamath mountains converge. The sixth painting features 61 fungi of the Pacific Northwest and the seventh painting displays eighteen bees representing eighteen different categories of bees in Oregon as well as twenty-two of the native plants they love to pollinate.

Deb grew up in various midwestern cities near Lake Michigan. She was introduced to life in the Pacific Northwest when she spent her final semester of college at a program on the Green Springs mountain east of Ashland. She continues to thrive through living in mountain communities of the Pacific Northwest.

Deb’s passion for the outdoors initially led to work as a canoe guide in Minnesota and a wilderness therapy field guide in Montana’s backcountry. She also served as Ladakh Coordinator for the International Society of Ecology and Culture in the Himalayan mountains of Ladakh, India, and then as founder and director of the Biodiversity Arts Outdoor School in Southern Oregon. In the summer of 2025 she will teach her first course at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Otis, Oregon.