WAOW Artistry of the West

The WAOW Artistry is slowly being built to provide a page on our site to promote each artist. This project began late summer 2024. We have over 300 members to load here on their pages. You can search by name, location or by subject matter to find an artist.

Shuli Wang • Illinois • waow

Shuli Wang is an accomplished artist residing in the vibrant Chicago metropolitan area. She was born in Inner Mongolia, China.  She exhibited exceptional talent and an unwavering passion for the world of drawing and painting from an early age.  Wang possesses a remarkable versatility, working fluently with an array of artistic mediums including pencil, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, and oil. Her artistic style can be aptly described as impressionistic realism, where vibrant brushwork often reminiscent of traditional Chinese freehand paintings infuses life into her creations.  The subjects of her work are as diverse as her mediums, spanning landscapes, still life, and portraiture.

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Kathy Gale • Idaho • waow

Kathy Gale creates contemporary art that is a fusion of impressionism and abstraction.   She tells the stories of farmers, migrant workers, and ranch hands at work set against the sweeping vistas of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana.    She uses a variety of media to achieve her characteristic broken color that lends richness and texture to her painting surfaces, including oils, acrylics, gouache, watercolor and pastels. 

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Jennifer Wendt • Kansas • waow

Jennifer Wendt paints what she knows best—the animals and nature she enjoys every day operating her own small ranch.  Cattle, horses, dogs, barn cats and wildlife are favorite subjects for this self–taught artist.  She works from her home studio.  She can otherwise be found outdoors riding one of her horses, tending cattle, checking fences, choring, or doing any of the other myriad tasks around the ranch.  Wendt’s observant mind drinks in the surrounding inspiration and translates that into paintings that are exhibited in many of the top shows and exhibitions in the United States.  She has garnered many awards, including several "Best of Shows", "Artist's Choices", and "People's Choices" along the way.

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Gloria Chadwick • California • waow

Gloria Chadwick finds joy in the wildlife sketching possibilities at the world–famous zoos, aquariums and wonderful coastline of the San Diego, California area, of which she is a native.  She is a master painter working in oils, acrylics, and watercolors. 

Chadwick is a dedicated enthusiast of wildlife conservation and delights to create art that brings attention to the animals—especially endangered species.  Her works have been accepted in many juried shows and festivals and have won numerous awards. 

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Barbara Gerard–Mitchell • Montana • waow

Barbara Gerard-Mitchell is an artist who works primarily in oils, acrylics, and watercolors.  Her subjects include landscape, wildlife, equine, and the western life-style. She is a graduate from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she received an Associate of Fine Arts Degree.  She has continued her studies with many renowned master painters. 

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Helen F. Howerton • Oklahoma • waow

Helen F. Howerton,  a native Tulsan, knew from the age of 8 that art was her life’s career.   Drawing birds and animals was a passion that grew into painting, which now also includes sculpture.  Taking inspiration from her study of animal anatomy and sketches of nature, Helen shares her individual interpretation of the spirit in each animal.

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Rose Collins • Arizona • waow

Rose Collins was enthralled with art, painting, and the western culture from her early childhood.  She relocated to Tucson, Arizona when she retired from her practice as a psychologist in New York.  She picked up a paintbrush and took a leap of faith into the unknown. That began a soul-searching decade of self-discovery, mentorship and successes in the very competitive art world, and paved the way to gallery representation. She loves being an established local Tucson Wildlife and Contemporary Southwest Artist.. 

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Debbie Carroll • Texas • waow

The work of Debbie Carroll is about expressing what she observes when surveying the West and Southwest regions of the United States. The challenge is to draw out the intrinsic beauty of the ordinary and often overlooked.  She strives to elevate her subjects in her painting — not to show the obvious, but to reveal the extraordinariness of what is familiar.  Travel is the backbone of Carroll’s work.  She feels it throws her into new circumstances and surroundings, bringing new inspiration to take home to share through her studio work. 

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Carolyn C. Bell • Texas • waow

Carolyn C. Bell, an award–winning Texas artist, fell in love with the southwest’s vast landscape upon moving to Texas at the age of eight.  Her love of the southwest landscape has been translated into many artworks that depict the myriad colors, rocks, and foliage that has caught her eye and heart.  Southwestern Spanish architecture and the Spanish missions of Texas and New Mexico are also cherished subjects, along with florals, wildlife and still life.

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Jill Banks • Virginia • waow

Oil painter, JILL BANKS, teaches multiple classes a week over three semesters each year; exhibits at  top fine art festivals; sends work off to juried exhibitions; paints in juried and invitational plein air competitions; takes on a small number of portrait commissions; and travels for personal painting trips and inspiration. Stylistically, she continues to evolve from realism with feeling to impressionism with even more emotion and simplification.

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Marcia Ballowe • Montana • waow

Born in Washington state but raised in Montana, Marcia can't remember a time when she wasn't sketching even as a child. Some of her fondest memories were trips to rural Montana or to her grandmother's cabin on the lake. "I often found myself drawn to the  majesty of the early morning and late evening light always surrounding the snowcapped mountains," Ballowe reflects.

 Marcia Ballowe’s creativity flourished with the encouragement of her husband, and family, as she attended multiple workshops with notable national artists: Irving Shapiro, Scott Christensen, John MacDonald, Marc Hanson, Matt Smith, to mention a few. But she felt the biggest impact on her work came through plein air painting where she learned to capture the fleeting light and mood of a place in her art.  Photographs never held the values and hues she could see outdoors. 

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