WAOW Artistry of the West

The WAOW Artistry is slowly being built to provide a page on our site to promote each artist* You can search by name, location or by subject matter to find an artist.

*Artist Source Acknowledgment: Content on these pages is shared with permission and is sourced from the featured member artist’s website and professional biography. All rights remain with the artist.

Cher Anderson • Arizona • waow

Cher Anderson is a wildlife artist and photographer known for her highly detailed, realistic paintings of animals, birds and nature.  She works in acrylics, watercolor, and colored pencils.  Her process often starts with photographing animals in the wild, then translating those moments into her detailed paintings.

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Betsy Johnson Welty • Colorado • waow

Betsy Johnson Welty is a contemporary American oil painter best known for her vibrant, expressive landscapes, cityscapes, and floral compositions featuring bold colors and loose brushwork that blend realism, impressionist elements and graphic design sensibilities.  She regards the act of creating art as a process of continued discovery that brings with it challenges, surprises, obstacles, insight and epiphanies. Each new painting presents a new set of adventures and a quest for interpreting the world she sees in a unique way.

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Pam Holnback • Colorado • waow

Pam Holnback creates contemporary impressionist oil paintings.  She finds inspiration in nature, her travels, and in her home and garden.  Each painting is done with loose, spontaneous brushwork that expresses the light and color that she sees.  The principles of art and elements of design are basic in the initial drawing and development of each painting.  She produces artworks both en plein air and in her studio.

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Cathy Toot • Montana • waow

Cathy Toot is an oil painter whose work captures the Western way of life and the animals of the American West with authenticity.  She works in the realist tradition, depicting people engaged in ranch life, cowboy culture, wildlife and ranch animals.  She began her artistic journey painting on gourds.  She developed her work into a full-time professional fine art painting career. 

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Donna Cox • Colorado • waow

Donna Cox is an award-winning artist who has been drawing animals for as long as she can remember.  Her meticulous attention to detail, as well as an ability to infuse that essential spark of life into her subjects, sets her work apart.  Essentially a self-taught artist, working primarily in oil and pencil, her work reflects her love and respect for wildlife and the environment. She is an avid conservationist.  Her background as a veterinary technician, as well as an enthusiasm for hunting and the outdoors, have greatly contributed to her ability to accurately portray animals in their natural habitat.

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Sandhyaa Shetty • Texas • waow

Sandhyaa Shetty is a fine artist specializing in landscape paintings executed in oils and acrylics.  She works in the traditions of the impressionist and plein air genres.  Her earliest works reflected the beauty of rural India as she experienced it at her grandparents’ farm.  She sought to paint the interaction of divine nature and emotional connection to the land with the intent to freeze it upon her canvas to preserve it forever.  When her marriage brought her to the United States, the beautiful landscapes and people in her new home continue to inspire her work.

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Bonnie Shields • Idaho • waow

Bonnie Shields is a well-known American Western artist known as, “The Tennessee Mule Artist.” She is especially famous for her detailed, humorous, and affectionate artwork focused on mules and donkeys.  Her work stands out because it captures the personality and intelligence of mules, sometimes with narrative flair, sometimes with a cartoon-like twist.

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Skeeter Leard • New Mexico • waow

Skeeter Leard is a regional New Mexico wildlife artist and illustrator, working primarily in acrylics and pastels.  She is highly respected locally for both her art and her long-standing involvement in conservation and community arts.  The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is a major influence in her work and the subjects she paints — birds and native desert animals. 

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Nancy Tome • Montana • waow

Award winning, fine wildlife artist, Nancy Tome, depicts a variety of birds and other wildlife in everyday life. Combining distinct realism and composition in her paintings, Tome combines bold colors with intense detail to depict animals in their natural environment. Her acrylic paintings are designed to capture “a moment in time” of that animal’s daily life. She uses research obtained from travel, zoos and private collections to compile all of her knowledge and understanding of an animal and its environment into a realistic and emotional scene.

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Judy Buckner • Texas • waow

Judy Buckner paints her deep connection to the Southwest, fueled by family time spent in New Mexico, Arizona, California and Colorado, where she draws inspiration for her oil paintings from the people and landscapes. She is also a mural painter, whose work is displayed at Dallas Fort Worth and Love Field airports in Texas, in addition to several restaurants in the area.

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Gaylene Fortner • Montana • waow

Gaylene Fortner creates artworks inspired by her cherished country life in her home state of Montana.  Wildlife, ranch life, antiques, and flowers grace her paintings created with oils or watercolors.  She explores new methods in her paintings in order to reveal the uniqueness of each subject, utilizing a variety of sizes from small to large formats. She especially enjoys painting miniatures, some of which are so small that a magnifying glass is needed to appreciate the details.

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Deanne McKeown • Idaho • waow

 I find inspiration for my sculpture in the wildlife and cultures of the high desert of Arizona and in ancient folklore and magic.  I never really know entirely what will happen when I begin a piece. It is something of a negotiation with ideas, materials, and chance. It grows into what it wants to be. The inspiration for an idea may come from any number of directions. It could come through reading, poetry, a dream, or simply stimulated by the dialogue presented by a previous work. It’s important to be present, open to any stimulus. 

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Carol Devereaux • Texas • waow

Carol Devereaux is a landscape and figurative artist working in Dallas, Texas.  Devereaux’s loose, painterly artworks reflect her interest in natural light and the visual patterns that define form. She enjoys working en plein air to create her landscape scenes; or from life when doing figurative work.  Her work is also informed by her travel experiences that she explores in her studio work.  Oil and pastel are her primary mediums.

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Elin Thomas • California • waow

Elin Thomas has been painting professionally in both acrylics and oils since 1983.   She owns and rides a motorcycle, which she uses to travel to many gorgeous locations for camping, painting and loving life. Her dog Bessie is a companion on these journeys.  She’s been called the “fastest brush in the West” when doing on-location painting, completing a painting in about 40 minutes.  

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Marla Smith • Arizona • waow

Marla Smith is a contemporary oil painter known for creating artworks that reflect the landscapes and spirit of the American Southwest.  Her paintings capture Southwest scenery and ranch life, drawing on the natural beauty and wide–open spaces of the region, especially near Prescott, her home.

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Katrina Rae • Michigan • waow

Katrina Rae found her passion for creating art working in soft pastel, mixed media, and oils.  She explores representational subjects, with a strong focus on culturally significant themes — especially those involving Native American traditions, people, and ceremonial regalia; western themes and animals.  One of her notable technical innovations is using protective clear coatings that eliminate the need for glass over her pastel and mixed media works.

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Denise Tabari • California • waow

Denise Tabari is an oil painter whose work blends elements of realism and abstraction.   Her paintings are characterized by emotionally expressive subject matter and thoughtful use of color.  She enjoys being outdoors and loves to paint and capture the realistic beauty of life.

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