Dreamscapes, Murals, and Coffee as Art: A Port Townsend Creative Builds Worlds Big and Small

Art news by Carolyn Lewis

For Port Townsend artist Tara Velan, creativity begins in the space between dreams and waking, between nature and memory, between performance and paint. Her work lives in those blurred spaces where the subconscious collides with the natural world.

“My work is like a dreamscape,” Velan said in an email interview, “I get lost in mental landscapes and try to capture the weird, wonderful stuff that happens there. It has to come out somehow.”

Living in the Pacific Northwest has acted as what she calls a “permission slip” for her creativity. The forests, oceans, and expansive skyscapes of Port Townsend tap into something primal—even spiritual—and continually feed her imagination. Synesthesia plays a role, she says with a laugh, but so does a deep sensitivity to mood, emotion and place.

Velan is drawn to wildness and to emotional threshold spaces—places where things blur and feeling takes over. In a culture saturated with speed and artificial imagery, she asks herself how to return to true wonder and true human experience and how to invite others there as well.

Her visual work is deeply shaped by her background in theater. After studying fine arts and drama at the University of Pittsburgh, Velan earned a graduate fellowship through the highly competitive University Resident Theater Auditions program in New York City. The experience, she says, was demanding and transformative.

“Those years demanded everything,” she said, “They forced me to choose, very clearly, a professional creative life.”

At the University of Washington, Velan immersed herself in devised theater, exploring interdisciplinary work that combined movement, visual art and storytelling. In 2016, a solo performance piece that incorporated costumes, masks, movement and visual art extended beyond the classroom and into Seattle’s University District bars—an early signal that her work would resist easy categorization.

That theatrical influence remains central to her practice. Velan approaches murals, canvases and installations as performances, treating walls and spaces like stages. Composition becomes blocking. Color becomes a gesture. She builds stories in real time, allowing scenes to unfold organically.

Sometimes those scenes are monumental.

Murals entered Velan’s life during the pandemic, when quarantine collided with an urgent need for movement, connection, and outdoor space. She began painting on boarded-up businesses across Seattle, climbing scaffolding in all weather and interacting with passersby along the way.

“I’m a relentless extrovert,” she said, “That moment was terrifying, but it was also a victory.”

What hooked her was not only the scale, but the public interaction. Murals, Velan believes, carry a unique power. They can be decorative, political, joyful, or simply loud and colorful—sometimes all at once. Like music, they invite individual interpretation. At their best, they transform spaces and shift how entire neighborhoods feel.

Large-scale public work is only one side of Velan’s practice. She moves fluidly between paint, sculpture, graphics, and installation, guided less by medium than by curiosity. Alongside murals, she creates intimate shadow boxes—small, immersive worlds inspired by short fantasy fragments from her journals.

“They’re like bubbles of energy,” she said, “That feeling when you’re half-awake, trying to hold onto images before they disappear.”

The pieces play with scale and perspective, offering a quieter counterpoint to her public work.

Port Townsend has become both a home and creative anchor. Local projects include a playful collaboration with Dogs-A-Foot, designing a T-shirt prize for customers who complete the business’s hot dog challenge. Additional mural proposals with the City of Port Townsend are underway, along with several unrevealed projects.

Velan’s collaborative spirit extends into her newest venture: Conduit Café, a creative space she co-founded with her partner, coffee roaster Jesse Nelson. For them, coffee is not separate from art—it is a medium.

“Coffee roasting meets every criterion of artmaking,” Velan says, “It’s sensory, intentional, and process-driven.”

Conduit Café is envisioned as an evolving experiment rather than a traditional café. It includes the Uptown Sky Gallery, which will feature rotating local and regional artists in two-month exhibitions. The goal is to support emerging artists while fostering connections beyond Port Townsend.

The café will also host open-house evenings that blend art viewings with guided coffee explorations, tastings and sensory studies. The emphasis, Velan says, is collaboration over competition—a value drawn from both the art world and small-batch coffee culture. Art is about creativity and coffee is a catalyst for connection and is rooted in community.

At the center of her work is curiosity. She often returns to a quote by Georgia O’Keeffe: “Interest is the most important thing in life. . . interest is continuous.”

What does Velan hope people take away from her work—whether from a mural, a shadow box or a cup of coffee?

“A spark,” she says, “Curiosity. A connection to imagination. If people walk away feeling more present in the world around them, that’s everything.”

Her work will be on view this summer at Conduit Café—visible, fittingly, over a great cup of coffee—inviting the community to slow down, step inside and linger.