Sitting at a tall table by the window of The Hardware Store Restaurant, Pam Ingalls recently talked about the oil paintings that hang throughout the popular eatery, including those in the back gallery. The current exhibit, “V is for Vashon, The ABCs of Vashon Island,” features an iconic island scene for every letter of the alphabet. Ingalls is celebrating a decade of showing her work at the restaurant, and all of the paintings on all of the walls are hers.

“I was trying to figure out what would be a good subject for the letter A,” Ingalls said,  her blue eyes sparkling beneath a fringe of auburn bangs. “I landed on the Amanita mushroom, but didn’t know where to find one. I learned about a huge farm that grows them behind O Space. That was an unexpected discovery about the island.”

Finding the unexpected or the not well publicized proved to be a trick for Ingalls, 57, who has made Vashon her home for the last 29 years. She knows the island well, even the relatively obscure, like the UFO sculpture located at the airport. But what typically catches Ingalls’ attention are everyday objects and everyday people.

“I like painting what we are used to, noticing things we don’t necessarily always notice,” she said. “I don’t usually paint landscapes because they are already so beautiful, so painting Mt. Rainier for this show was weird. I focus on things like the bathroom sink, things we don’t think have beauty.”

Ingalls comes by her artistic talent through diligence, discipline and hard work, but being the child of an art professor and graphic artist probably didn’t hurt. She admits her artistic seed was planted early. Born in Spokane, where her father started the art department at Gonzaga University, Ingalls recalled growing up in her father’s department “with great smells of paint and lots of materials to play with.” She graduated with a degree in art from Gonzaga and spent a year abroad studying art at the Accademia Di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy.

Yet post college, art took a back seat to Ingalls’ other passion: social justice. When she was 24, Ingalls completed what she calls a peace walk.

“It was a pilgrimage, and we walked across the U.S. and Europe, ending in Bethlehem,” she said.

Back in the U.S., Ingalls became a Jesuit volunteer and  helped the elderly in Seattle’s Central District. To support her social justice efforts, she worked for her parents, who originated the tourist maps familiar to many visitors of Seattle and other cities around the globe. After she married, Ingalls and her husband moved to Chehalis, where they lived in an intentional community dedicated to peace. When her then husband got a job at K2, Ingalls jumped at the chance to come to Vashon.

“Sure I’ll go! Where is it?” Ingalls said, recalling the moment with a laugh. “I loved Vashon right away. But then who doesn’t?”

It was in a small shed outside her new home on Vashon that Ingalls finally pursued her art. She painted Seattle’s street people in an attempt to connect social justice with art, and she opened her first show in 1987 at the Blue Heron. The late artist Joe Petta hung Ingalls’ work there and encouraged Ingalls to keep painting. She acted on his advice, but after producing enough canvases for four more shows that same year, Ingalls needed time to reassess.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I wondered, ‘Is this my parents’ dream or mine?’”

So she took a break from painting and built a house with her father-in-law. Eventually, after finishing the house, Ingalls said she came to grips with both her art and her parents, figuring she had better “just go for it.” She quit her job glazing tiles for Irene Otis and spent her savings on a plane ticket to New York to study under artist Frederick Frank, the  author of “The Zen of Seeing.”

That decision set in motion her artistic commitment. She began to draw every day. And like the proverb that states, “When the student is ready, then the teacher will appear,” Ingalls said she soon met — and trained with for three years — her master teacher, Ron Lukus, a former student of the Russian impressionist Sergei Bongart.

Today,  Ingalls’ work hangs on gallery walls in Edmonds and Bainbridge, as well as Santa Fe, Denver and Fredericksburg, Texas. She generally has two or three gallery shows a year, plus the two island studio tours. She also teaches workshops around the country, including one that will begin at the Blue Heron in January .

“People say to me, ‘You are so prolific,’” she said. “But I say this is what I do. You don’t say to a plumber, ‘Gee, you’ve done a lot of sinks this year.’ How I think of it is I just paint.”

And paint she does, sometimes all over the globe. Her social justice portrait series “Facing The World,” has taken Ingalls to India, Guatamala, New Zealand, Kenya, Jamaica, Gnome and New York City, where she once painted everybody in one apartment building.

“I like to paint portraits to connect people … so we’ll begin to see that even people we’ve never heard of are just living out their lives like we are and more likely to believe the best of them, whether they live on the other side of the world, or even next door,” Inglalls said. “We’ll be less likely to support a war with them, or with any one else, for that matter. I hope my portraits are another thread of peace that connects one person to another, one community to another.”

Ingalls said she doesn’t need to travel to find faces, that every community is fascinating, but her dream is to have painted portraits on all seven continents.

If social justice informs her art, then spirituality, Ingalls said, supports it. She has done Vipassana meditation for 27 years.

“I try to meditate two hours every day,” she said. “If I can do that, then I can paint the long hours. The benefits are amazing.”

Looking around the Hardware Store Restaurant, a certain harmonious quality pervades Ingalls’ collection. That comes from the “luscious and forgiving” oils she paints with, she explained, and from her limited palette — she uses one yellow, two reds, two blues, a black and a white. It also emanates from the light reflecting on her chosen subject, something the artist first captures on video. Her technique is to watch film of her subject, then stop the video and paint from a particular frame, as she believes video captures light, movement and people better than still photography.

An eager islander interrupted Ingalls’ explanation about her technique, saying she thought Ingalls should turn the show into a children’s book. Ingalls graciously accepted the compliment and told her fan that she and Annie Brule, a former islander, plan to make an “ABCs of Vashon” coffee-table book, with a narrative written by islander Tom Conway.

It was a Vashon moment, and Ingalls knew it.

“There are so many people who support the arts here,” she said. “They buy art; they go to concerts and enjoy plays. And the many artists are supportive of each other. I feel so lucky to live here. I don’t think I could have blossomed in another place.”