Inside one of Coupeville’s historic Victorian homes, in a room filled with windows and sunlight, Stella Canfield paints a rocky mountain stream with watercolors. On another easel next to an antique wood stove, she is working on a bustling scene of city life.

Canfield lives a quiet life of so many artists in Coupeville, but her exotic, Dracula-like accent gives her away. She’s got stories to tell from a rich and exciting past.

Canfield escaped with two babies from behind the Iron Curtain 25 years ago and eventually ended up on Whidbey Island, where she became a well-known artist.

Over the last five years, Canfield has been sharing a bit of her past with fellow artists while helping orphaned children in her homeland. She returned to Bulgaria with a group of paintbrush-wielding Whidbey residents. She found that her bucolic homeland makes the perfect backdrop for inspirational, educational artists’ tours led by noted Northwest artists.

Now, the nonprofit organization Canfield created to coordinate the tours is expanding into new territory — literally.

Judy Lynn, Whidbey resident and former director of the Coupeville Arts Center, was recently hired as the new director of Coupeville-based Stellar Arts Foundation. She will oversee the expansion of the artists’ tours to the Czech Republic in September, as well as a Bulgaria trip this spring.

“Everybody is welcome to come with us,” Lynn said. “You don’t need to be a painter.”

Canfield said such Old World countries are perfect places for artists. They aren’t overrun with tourists, but retain a real sense of the unromanticized past and an untarnished natural world.

“Bulgaria is very pastoral,” Canfield said. “It doesn’t have the grandeur of Western Europe with their giant cathedrals and buildings. But it is very old and has such incredible history, culture and traditions.”

For grandeur, Bulgarians rely on tall mountains, beautiful beaches on the Black Sea, rivers and valleys.

In the future, Lynn is looking into the possibility of trips to many other unorthodox tourist destinations, such as Vietnam, Hungary, Guatemala and remote corners of Italy.

Even more exciting, Canfield said the money raised by the tours will be spent providing more opportunities and services for the 70 children in a Bulgarian orphanage.

Canfield said the foundation “adopted” the orphanage in the village of Bursiza, near Varna, in 2002. The foundation spent thousands of dollars on building and remodeling projects, as well as excursions for the children. The officials at the orphanage keep the facility clean and repaired, but Canfield described it as “very basic.”

Recently, Canfield has been looking at ways of expanding and improving the foundation’s charitable work at the orphanage. She said it’s important to actually work with local people and figure out how to meet the needs of the children directly, instead of just “throwing money at the problem.”

Canfield, therefore, created an innovative program in which local people from the town teach classes at the orphanage.

The small classes cover things like painting, sewing, traditional dance and crafts.

“We want the children to go out into the world with skills,” Canfield said, noting that an alarming number of orphans turn to prostitution or crime after being turned out of the facility at age 18. The downside of the end of communist rule is the lack of job opportunities.

Foundation members are also trying to find a psychologist in Bulgaria who they can hire to spend time with the children.

People who go on the Bulgaria tour get to meet the orphans, which Canfield describes as a very rewarding experience. Last summer, she arranged for two young Coupeville residents, Clark Bishop and Lauren Hubbard, to spend two months working with the children in the orphanage.

“The children were very sad to see them go,” Lynn said.

The combination of art instruction, charitable work and travel may seem like a weird mix, but Lynn feels that it’s a marvelous and creative way for Canfield to reconcile the different parts of her life.

Canfield lived half her life in Bulgaria, where she was a national athlete. After leaving her native country, she eventually moved to Coupeville with her husband. While raising four children, she discovered her artistic talent after taking a class at the Coupeville Arts Center.

Since then, she has transformed much of her home into a gallery and a studio, where she paints watercolor when she’s not teaching. And then she became a tour guide, a nonprofit founder and a philanthropist.

“I enjoy helping people discover,” she said.