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.
Brandi Donan • Tennessee • waow
Brandi Donan is a contemporary impressionist artist known for her expressive oil paintings and fine art work. Her style focuses on capturing the essence of life with dynamic brushwork and expressive energy, aiming to evoke strong emotional responses from viewers. She creates both figurative and representational work, often in oil but also producing drawings and pastels.
Laurie LaMere • Wyoming • waow
Laurie Lamere has lived in Wyoming since the age of sixteen. She loves Wyoming, where inspiration is endless, and the wildlife and landscapes are food for her soul. She first resided in the small western town of Pinedale, where she finished high school, and stayed for the next 40 years. She moved to Jackson Hole with her family in 2013. There she joined the Teton Plein Air Painters on their weekly painting excursions. She soon learned that painting “en plein air” would be her preference whenever possible.
Lamere is mostly self-taught. Painting from life helped to improve her skills immensely, not to mention the sheer joy of being able to paint the beautiful Teton Range and its surrounding landscapes on a regular basis. She now lives in Ten Sleep, Wyoming and tries to spend as much time as possible painting outdoors.
Judy Thompson • Iowa • waow
Judy Thompson is an artist of the Great Plains area known as Siouxland. This area is home to vast fields, big skies and lush prairies that are full of history, diverse landscapes and natural beauty, providing the perfect inspiration for Thompson's vibrant, textured, watercolor paintings. She explores the intricate relationships that shape the prairie ecosystems and the ways in which human activity continues to influence them. She chooses transparent watercolor as her medium for its expressive range and adaptability. It can be bold and spontaneous or carefully controlled; shifting from serene to energetic—even chaotic. This versatility allows her to push the boundaries of the medium, experimenting with surface treatments and mixed media to develop unique textures and visual depth.
Teanna Kurtz • Washington • waow
Teanna Kurtz creates pastel paintings of landscapes, light, water, skies and wildlife, primarily on suede substrate. She loves pastel for the available rich pigments and the expressive quality she is able to achieve with them. Her goals for her artworks are purity of form and technique while capturing atmospheric moments of peace, serenity and calm in nature.
Deborah LaFogg–Docherty • Florida • waow
Deborah LaFogg–Docherty is best known for her detailed, photorealistic paintings that celebrate wildlife, landscapes and the natural world. She works in pastel, oil, and acrylic. Her art practice is driven by a lifelong commitment to nature and conservation. She has participated in artist expeditions, including conservation-focused travels to Kenya to support efforts for endangered species.
Carol Lee Thompson • Pennsylvania • waow
Carol Lee Thompson is a full-time, professional artist, classically trained in the methods of the Old Masters. She paints a wide range of subject matter including landscape, equine and animal, portrait, and Western themes.
Pokey Park • Arizona & Massachusetts • waow
Pokey Park is a sculptor extraordinaire whose early and endearing love of both nature and art are the foundation for her whimsical, magical creations. Her kinship and communion with nature and its inhabitants results in uniquely stylized bronzes of animals of every size, shape and species. Pokey studies wildlife in natural habitats so she can get a feel for their personalities, not just their anatomy. Their personalities are extremely important for her to be able to give her sculpture a unique attitude. The environment they live in sets the mood for the finished sculpture.
Lori Kiplinger Pandy • Colorado • waow
Artist Lori Kiplinger Pandy sculpts with empathy and energy. She diligently researches and gets to know and understand her subjects before creating sculptures in stylized realism. She then brings a unique understanding of anatomy and balance to her subjects. With subtle changes in posture, gesture or weight distribution she conjures up feelings of tension, anticipation or repose, which tells a story with the image that captures the spirit of a person or of nature.
Cathy Sue Munson • Texas • waow
Cathy Sue Munson paints intricately detailed watercolor and gouache paintings, specializing in wildlife, longhorn cattle, western subjects and commissioned dog portraiture.
She graduated from the University of Texas with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree, with honors, in Studio Art. She was featured in an article on outstanding canine artists in the April 2008 issue of Southwest Art Magazine. The artist is widely recognized for her commissioned artwork for the University of Texas Athletics and Texas Exes alumni of their longhorn mascots, Bevo IX through current Bevo XV. The paintings are on display in the Silver Spurs Museum at the football stadium.
Carolyn Mock • Oklahoma • waow
Carolyn Mock is a realist artist, who has painted wildlife and western themes for many years. She has always worked in oil because she enjoys its creamy feel and the slow drying time that allows her the opportunity to work and blend the colors as the painting evolves. Her choice of wildlife grew out of a firm belief that nature, as well as everything in it, has the right to exist. She works to show the dignity of each individual animal and the awe of them she experiences as she paints.
Sara Ray Bloodwolf • New Mexico • waow
Descended from performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and legends of the old frontier. Sara’s great, great grandfather Sequah performed with Buffalo Bill Cody for crowds and sold a patented cure all “Prairie Flower” in blue glass bottles bearing his name. Her ancestry stretches to the eastern woodlands where her grandfathers were the literal inspiration for James Fenimore Coopers “Last of the Mohicans” tales, the very real exploits of her long hunter family and their fearlessness far beyond what was ever penned in his books.
Carol Lundeen • Minnesota • waow
Carol Lundeen is an oil painter specializing in animals, both wild and domestic. Her style is representational. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art from Northwest Nazarene College, Nampa, Idaho. She continued her studies with Robert Hagberg, Jay Moore, along with a host of other master artists.
Becky Lucht • Oklahoma • waow
Becky Lucht is a scratchboard artist. Her body of work reflects her ongoing love of animals, from horses and pets to wildlife, with a few fantasy creatures thrown in. They are generally rendered in the stark black and white of scratchboard, although she has been drawn to color versions of late.
Sarah Kennedy • Arizona • waow
Sarah Kennedy expresses her love of the natural world, the beauty of the desert, contemporary and traditional ranch life, rodeo, horses and figurative portraiture through her oil paintings. A sparkle in the eye, the softness of a draped mane or curved neck, the light that creates drama or luminosity, color that brings excitement or serenity are elements that infuse her work to capture life and feeling.
Reenie Kennedy • California • waow
Reenie Kennedy is an award-winning acrylic artist. Her work reflects her love for wildlife with an emphasis on bird art. She enjoys combining wildlife with her exquisite floral and ocean inspired backdrops, along with a touch of humor. She believes a sense of humor in painting is one of the best ways to lift the spirits.
Burneta Venosdel • Oklahoma • waow
Burneta Venosdel is a national, award-winning bronze sculptor and pastel painter. Many of her sculpture subjects are inspired by her surroundings and life on her Oklahoma ranch. She paints the landscapes of western Oklahoma and the wildflowers from the mountains west of Gunnison that she has trod for over 20 years.
Cecy Turner • Texas & Colorado • waow
Cecy Turner is an award-winning artist who works in both watercolor and oil. She prefers to paint en plein air, and does so almost daily since she began spending half of every year in Colorado. The effects of light and atmosphere are her favorite things to capture in paint.
Turner graduated from Vanderbilt University and did post-graduate study in art at University of North Texas. She has additionally studied under numerous accomplished artists in both oil and watercolor
Jennifer Hunter • Illinois • waow
Nationally recognized, award–winning artist, Jennifer Hunter, is known for her sensitive storytelling of American history through her art work. Her paintings exude unique quality of light and rich luminous color in both watercolor and oil. Hunter finds that her working knowledge of the use of transparency in watercolor enhances her oil painting techniques; and working in oil allows for experimentation with textured surfaces using both transparency and opacity of paint to give life to her work.
Elizabeth Lewis Scott • Alabama • waow
Elizabeth Lewis Scott believes that there are no shortcuts when creating art and she delights in the details. Her drawings and paintings of horses, cattle, donkeys, wildlife and western life are filled with the little details that give life and authenticity to her work.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Arts from Principia College, Elsah, Illinois. She then further honed her craft painting en plein air across Europe. She worked almost entirely on equine subjects early in her career, adding wildlife and western subjects in the mid-1990s.
Barbara Ellis • Vermont • waow
Barbara Ellis is a classically-trained academic realist painter. Her artwork celebrates the beauty of the natural world in all its variety — from delicate mare and foal scenes, to wildlife and rural animal scenes, to classical portraits and still lives. Ellis seeks to capture the beauty, dignity, and personalities of her subjects in her oil and acrylic paintings. Horses are an especially loved subject. She has spent years working to perfect her craft to achieve anatomical accuracy while expressing equine fire and elegance.