Stephanie Pehar is a Canadian watercolor artist based in Saint-Lazare, Quebec, a forested rural community just west of Montreal. Inspired by the beauty of the natural world, she creates paintings that capture birds, animals, and nature with a soft, expressive touch.
Combining painterly textures with an illustrative sensibility, her work captures subjects in a way that feels both intimate and slightly otherworldly. Through her art, Stephanie invites viewers to pause and reconnect — with nature, with their inner world, and with the courage it takes to grow.
At the heart of my work is a theme that has quietly guided much of my life: learning to fly.
For many of us, growth doesn’t arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly — through moments of reflection, courage, uncertainty, and discovery. Birds have become a natural symbol of this journey in my work. They represent freedom, perspective, resilience, and the quiet strength required to leave the familiar behind.
Through watercolor, I explore the delicate balance between vulnerability and strength that exists in both nature and ourselves. I’m drawn to subjects that carry a sense of wisdom, mystery, or presence — creatures and landscapes that feel as though they hold stories of their own.
My hope is that my work offers a moment of stillness in a fast-moving world, and a space where viewers can pause, breathe, and perhaps recognize a piece of their own journey reflected back at them.
The path that led me back to painting was not a straight one.
For more than a decade, I worked primarily as a photographer, creating portraiture and conceptual collaborations that often blurred the line between photography and painting. Although photography gave me incredible creative opportunities, deep inside I felt a pull toward a more personal and introspective form of expression.
Around 2014 was when I embarked on a conscious journey of self-discovery. During that time I encountered the old fable of the eagle raised among chickens — a story about an eagle that spends its entire life believing it cannot fly simply because it has never been shown that it can. The story struck a chord with me. It raised a question that lingered long afterward:
How often do we mistake the stories we’ve been told about ourselves for the limits of our own nature?
A few years later, after moving from Toronto to the small rural town of Saint-Lazare, Quebec, I found myself returning to something I had loved earlier in life but had gradually set aside: painting.
Watercolor quickly became the medium through which many pieces of my creative life began to reconnect.
The slower rhythm of painting allowed space for reflection and rediscovery. Nature — especially birds, wildlife, and quiet landscapes — became recurring subjects in my work, mirroring my own ongoing journey of growth and transformation.
Today, painting has become both a practice and a compass — a way of exploring the world, and myself, one brushstroke at a time.
In many ways, my work is still about the same concept that first resonated with me years ago:
Learning to trust the wings we were born with.
Before returning to painting, Stephanie spent over a decade working as a professional photographer, beginning in 2007. Her work often explored themes of identity, transformation, and emotional storytelling, including collaborations with body painters that blended photographic imagery with painterly visual concepts.
Earlier in her career she also studied and worked in graphic design, an experience that continues to inform her sense of composition, visual balance, and storytelling through imagery.
These creative foundations still shape her artistic perspective today. Her sensitivity to light, atmosphere, and structure — developed through photography and design — now influences the way she approaches watercolor painting.
Photography also remains an important part of her creative practice, both as a way of observing the world more closely and as another medium through which she occasionally explores visual storytelling.
If something in this work resonates with you, you’re invited to explore the galleries and join my mailing list to receive occasional notes from the studio as the journey continues.
