Every July, Moss Street comes alive. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's Paint-In has been drawing artists and art lovers to Victoria for 37 years — and this summer it returns for its 37th edition.


On Saturday, July 18, 2026, the AGGV hosts the largest summer arts festival on Vancouver Island. Artists from Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands fill Moss Street from 11am to 4pm, turning the neighbourhood into one sprawling, open-air studio. Over 50,000 visitors are expected to walk through, watch, and connect with work being made right in front of them.

For the artists showing up year after year, it's never just about selling work. Ceramicist and illustrator Hannah Stinson (Munbeibi) describes the Paint-In as a place that keeps giving long after the day ends: "Each year I've shown my work, I've heard from folks for months afterwards who I connected with at the Paint-In — friends and collectors who have been incredibly supportive of my work." Painter Sandhu Singh frames it simply: "I was told when I got my first invitation that the Paint-In is about promoting art, not only sales. To this day I believe in that philosophy."


The event draws artists who work across every medium and tradition. Wildlife illustrator Kayoko Kawano sees it as proof of what creative energy can do in public: "The Paint-In is a manifestation of the positive force that creativity can bring to our lives — filled with so much joy and inspiration." Sculptor and painter Miles Lowry describes what happens when art leaves the gallery walls: "The work enters into a conversation with the environment. The boundaries between the artist, the art, and the public become porous." Abstract painter Etsuko Kaji-Holley adds that it's also a career inflection point: "It provides an invaluable chance to present my work to wider audiences — an essential step in advancing my career as an artist."


And for many, it's simply about the people. Marine artist Natasha van Netten puts it plainly: "I have made connections with people at the Paint-In years ago that have become close friends. In a way, this event is like a huge art-family gathering."


Opus is proud to sponsor the festival's beverage garden and support the presenting artists bringing this event to life. It's the kind of community investment that feels straightforward to us — put resources behind the people making art and the spaces that bring audiences to it.


The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria opens at 11am (admission by donation) and runs until 6pm, offering visitors time to move between the energy on the street and the quiet of over 22,000 works inside — including the most significant collection of Asian art in Western Canada.


Bring your sketchbook. Bring your curiosity. Bring the kids.


Art Gallery Paint-In 2026Saturday, July 18 | Moss Street, Victoria, BCOn the Street: 11am – 4pm | Beverage Garden: 11am – 6pm | Gallery: 11am – 6pm (Admission by donation)


aggv.ca/art-gallery-paint-in-2026

Meet A Handful of the Artists You'll see

Hannah Stinson — Munbeibi Ceramic Art Dolls

Ceramic sculpture & illustration | Victoria, BC munbeibi.com

Hannah Stinson has been making Munbeibis since 2015 — miniature ceramic art dolls that began as characters in a handwritten zine about moon rocks who travel to Earth, drawn by curiosity about forests, seashores, and snacks. Eleven years later, the Munbeibis are still going on adventures, and Hannah is still sculpting them one by one in her Victoria studio.

The work is technically demanding in a way that isn't immediately obvious. Hannah works with stoneware clay, hand-sculpting and hand-glazing each piece, firing in a miniature Skutt kiln. Her signature technique — fabric sculpting in clay — involves pulling extremely thin sheets of stoneware into flowing ribbons, capes, and dresses without them collapsing or cracking in the kiln. The results look soft. They are stone.

Image: Hannah Stinson

The Munbeibis are designed to evoke tenderness, childhood wonder, and what Hannah describes as "the hidden worlds that exist inside each of us." They are small enough to carry. Collectable in a way that feels personal rather than precious.

This will be Hannah's third year showing at the event, and she approaches it like a solo exhibition — designing a unique collection and display concept each year. In 2025, she built the Munbeibi Ceramic Aquarium: Munbeibis dressed as fish, orcas, and sea creatures, displayed in water-filled fishbowls. Visitors could fish one out, let it dry off, and adopt it. "It was such a silly and fun experience," she says. "People are so open to the unusual at this event."

The connections she makes on Moss Street tend to outlast the day. "Each year I've shown my work, I've heard from folks for months afterwards — friends and collectors who have been incredibly supportive of my work."

Materials she works with:

  • Laguna Clay (available at Opus)
  • Amaco and Mayco Glazes
  • Skutt kiln
  • Pottery Supply House stoneware (sourced locally through Touci Ceramic Studio)

Sandhu Singh — Watercolour Painter

Watercolour painting | Victoria, BC sandhusingh.com

Sandhu Singh paints from memory and observation — not from a single subject or culture, but from the layered intersection of both. Childhood impressions from India surface in his work alongside the people, landscapes, and everyday moments of life in Canada. He describes it as two worlds meeting on the canvas: "a space where past and present can speak to one another."

Image: Sandhu Singh

His studio process is deliberate. He gathers material through keen observation, jotting details when he's out, referencing old sketchbooks and photographs. After completing a painting, he leaves it on the easel for hours — sometimes days — before committing to the final details. The result is work that holds looseness and intention at the same time, inviting viewers to find their own meaning in it.

Sandhu has also been open about painting as a healing practice — a way of navigating CPTSD with clarity and compassion. "Each brushstroke encourages honest introspection," he says. His work is neither didactic nor confessional, but it carries that weight honestly.

Sandhu has been a presence on Moss Street long enough to have accumulated the kind of stories that remind you what art events can be at their best. In one, he handed an expensive painting to a hesitant collector with the offer to take it home and bring it back if she didn't love it. She froze. "You don't even know me," she said. "What if I steal it?" He shrugged: "Then so be it. You have to have some faith in humanity." She bought it. In another, a student bought a small piece with his grandmother's money — money she had given him specifically for art, not groceries or textbooks. Years later, the same person arrived at Sandhu's door on a bicycle. A physician now, coming back for more work. "Art isn't just something people buy," he says. "It's something that travels with them, shapes them, and sometimes circles back years later in the form of a doctor on a bicycle."

Materials he works with:

Kayoko Kawano — Wildlife Illustrator

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Image: Kayoko Kawano
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Pen, pencil & digital illustration | Vancouver Island, BC wildlifeillustrationco.com

Kayoko Kawano's illustrations begin with a pencil, a pen, and time spent outside. Hikes, camping trips, beach walks — any moment that puts her in contact with the plants and animals of Vancouver Island's coastal environment. She draws from direct observation, building up detailed line work by hand before scanning and adding colour digitally. The result is a distinctive graphic quality: the personality of hand-drawn illustration combined with fields of clean, natural colour.

She founded Wild Life Illustration Co. after moving to Vancouver Island and finding the coastal landscape reignited a drawing practice she had carried since childhood in Ontario. Her work is a celebration of the outdoors — made as a reminder, she says, "of the importance of getting outside and loving nature."

The process has stayed close to its origins. A colouring book became a collection. The collection became a studio practice rooted in the same curiosity that started it.


Kayoko doesn't live in Victoria but returns for the Paint-In each year, and the warmth of the day stays with her. "Last year I had a friend helping me and after packing up she said it was so amazing to see the joy that my artwork brought to people." That exchange — work sparking joy, joy coming back — is what she values most about the event. "It is such a continual circle."


Materials she works with:

  • Pentel 0.5 mechanical pencil
  • Pigma Micron pens (available at Opus)
  • Digital colour workflow

Natasha van Netten — Marine & Cetacean Artist

Drawing, painting, installation & sculpture | Victoria, BC natashavannetten.com

This year marks ten years of Natasha van Netten making art about whales. Not illustrating them, but using cetology — the science of whale biology and behaviour — as both subject and structural framework. She works across drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture, finding visual ways to express data and information that are engaging rather than didactic.

Image: Natasha van Netten

Curiosity is at the centre of her practice. "When we feed our curiosity it grows," she says, "it strengthens our imagination and makes the world more interesting." When she hits a creative block, she goes back to nature and books about the ocean. Reading sparks ideas. Nature clears the mind enough for them to surface.


Her work is technically grounded in drawing — particularly the combination of naturally created texture and patterning with intentional mark-making. She describes inks and watercolour as her weakness (in the best sense), and drawing as her love.


Natasha describes the event as a huge art-family gathering. Past instructors, classmates, students, and Instagram connections all converge on Moss Street in a way that doesn't happen anywhere else. One memory stands out from an early year: nervous about setting up, she arrived at her spot to find the resident of the house she was set up in front of waiting in the driveway — offering coffee, the use of a bathroom, and check-ins through the day. "His kindness had a big impact on me," she says, "and reminded me how I also have the power to put people at ease and make them feel valued."


Materials she works with:

Miles Lowry — Painter & Sculptor

Multi-disciplinary: painting, sculpture | Victoria, BC mileslowry.ca

Miles Lowry chooses his medium based on what the work needs. In painting, that often means landscape — but not landscape as documentation. He's interested in the atmospheric energy of a place, the way light and weather shift the "frequency" of a location until it feels like a living participant in the work rather than a backdrop. In sculpture, the focus returns to the figure or its fragments, treated as a canvas for the marks of time and a dialogue with history.


He has lived in Victoria for most of his life and works with a wide material range — cotton fibre, cold wax, powdered pigments — in combinations that serve the work rather than announce themselves.

Image: Miles Lowry
Miles Lowry

Miles has a long history with the event, including one early year where he set up a raku kiln near the gallery and pulled red-hot clay from the fire, dousing it in oak leaves to create the smoky reduction effects on the glaze. In front of a crowd. "It was an exciting day creating in public with the magical reveal of the new sculpture," he says. He's also accumulated years of quieter moments — the reconnections with old faces, the unexpected reunions that come with showing up to the same place for decades. "One of the joys of the Paint-In is seeing new and old faces and sometimes some very heartfelt reunions."


Materials he works with:

Etsuko Kaji-Holley — Abstract Painter

Abstract acrylic painting | Vancouver Island, BC etsukok.art


Etsuko Kaji-Holley opens her artist statement with a Joan Mitchell quote: "I'm happy when I'm painting. I like it." It's a disarmingly simple frame for a practice that is anything but. Etsuko works in abstract, building paintings through numerous layers over weeks or months — meditative accumulations of mark-making that draw on Japanese calligraphy, Ikebana, and a deep attentiveness to the nature around her on Vancouver Island.

Image: Etsuko Kaji-Holley

She grew up in Tokyo singing in choirs and dancing, creating in whatever form was available. She spent years in the corporate world without losing it. Now a full-time painter, she describes facing a canvas as connecting her soul to the environment — sensing the season, the movement, the light — and translating that through intuitive gesture. Her regular yoga practice, she says, generates the internal energy that keeps her focused.


The surprise of finishing a painting is part of the process. After all those layers, she says, "I see the image from inspirations accumulated over time." The painting knows something she didn't, going in.


This will be Etsuko's third year at the event. At her first, she was thrilled when collectors walked away with her larger works — paintings she had expected people to admire but not carry home that day. One encounter led directly to a private show at Metchosin Art, after the organizer visited her booth on Moss Street. The Paint-In, for her, is both community and career: "It motivates me to continue creating, and provides an invaluable chance to present my work to wider audiences — an essential step in advancing my career as an artist."


Materials she works with:

The Art Gallery Paint-In takes place Saturday, July 18, 2026 on Moss Street in Victoria, BC. Opus is proud to be a sponsor of the 2026 event. aggv.ca/art-gallery-paint-in-2026


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