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.

Andria Sullivan • California • waow

Andria Sullivan is an American visual artist known for her representational paintings that focus on wildlife, botanical subjects, landscapes, and dream-like scenes. She creates her art mainly with oil paints and pastels.  She explores scale, color, and composition freely, sometimes placing her subjects in imaginative or unexpected contexts.

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Vanessa Rusczyk • California • waow

Vanessa Rusczyk paints the unique and resilient flora of desert landscapes.  She creates realistic yet interpretive oil paintings that emphasize the character of Western flora through bold, heightened color, strong value contrasts, and compositions with minimal backgrounds, allowing plant life to take center stage in her floral portraits.  She works out of her studio in suburban San Diego, surrounded by native chaparral and open spaces that grace her artworks.   Her latest wilderness explorations have expanded to include the Colorado Plateau and high deserts of New Mexico. Her artistic journey reflects her deep connection to the southwestern landscape and her commitment to showcasing the often over–looked natural beauty of its plant life.  She aims to inspire appreciation and protection of the plants that thrive in these wild spaces.

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Reneé Marz Mullis • New Mexico • waow

Reneé Marz Mullis is mesmerized by the pastel stick’s strength of color and brilliancy.   She paints southwestern landscapes, interiors and exteriors, florals, and still lifes, both in the studio and en plein air.  She most enjoys the multitude of challenges in conveying a strong sense of luminosity and atmosphere in her work. 

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Anna Lisa Leal • Texas • waow

Texas pastel artist, Anna Lisa Leal, honors the fierce beauty of the botanical wonders of Texas, and the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts; as well as the wildlife and found objects found in these regions. The textures and tenacity of life in these harsh areas inspire raw, radiant stories painted from her heart to represent the spirit of the American Southwest. 

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Linda Eppinger Johnson • Wyoming • waow

Linda Eppinger Johnson was born and raised on the front range of the Rocky Mountains. The diverse ecosystem influenced her western and botanical paintings, pottery and tiles/murals.

Linda uses her own experiences when creating her art. Sagebrush, wildflowers and even horned toads are in the hills of her front yard and find their way into her paintings and pottery.

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