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.
Ilene Gienger–Stanfield • Oregon • waow
Ilene Gienger-Stanfield is an American contemporary artist known for her figurative paintings in oil and soft pastels, distinguished by bold, impressionist color relationships and simplified forms. She describes her approach as “journalistic,” aiming at both figurative storytelling and getting straight to the essence of her subject without overly elaborate rendering. Collectors and galleries praise her ability to blend clarity of form with emotional resonance.
Tina Garrett • Missouri • waow
Tina Garrett is a contemporary American oil painter and portrait/figurative artist known for her emotionally resonant, dramatic artworks. Her contemporary realist paintings exude emotional presence and psychological depth through her evocative use of light, color and atmospheric quality. Collectors and critics alike note her ability to blend technical excellence with a poetic sensibility. She is recognized as one of the leading women in contemporary representational art.
Katherine Galbraith • New York • waow
Katherine Galbraith is a nationally recognized American artist known for her oil paintings focusing on figurative realism. Her subjects include portraits, landscapes, still life, florals, and animal subjects. Her portraiture clients have included notable figures such as President George H. W. Bush, and leaders in various professional fields. She has established a strong reputation across the United States through exhibitions, awards, and representation in galleries nationwide.
Lauri Ketchum • Oklahoma • waow
Lauri Ketchum's agricultural roots and life-long love affair with the American cowboy have fueled her concentration in Western Art. Ketchum loves capturing the essence of hard–working ranchers and sharing the ranching lifestyle through her art. She began her art career working in watercolor and acrylics before settling on oil as her preferred medium. Ketchum is largely self-taught and has refined her skills through workshops with artists she admires.
Phyllis Mantik de Quevedo • Oklahoma • waow
Phyllis Mantik de Quevedo is a sculptor and painter. She is most widely known for her figurative sculptures. The inspiration for her current figurative series is flora and focuses on representing botanical forms through metaphors as they relate to human forms and human experiences. Both human beings and flora contribute color and vibrancy and she is moved to capture and share expressive brief moments in time.
Laurie Sorkin • Colorado • waow
Laurie Sorkin is a contemporary oil and pastel painter of the diversity of life. Her subjects include people in every day activities, flowers, landscapes, old vehicles, and architecture, all marked by sensitive and visually pleasing compositions.
Sorkin actively exhibits her work, primarily in the Colorado region. She is a juried associate member of Women Artists of the West, and a member of Art Students League of Denver and Plein Air Artists Colorado.
Susan Eyer–Anderson • California • waow
Susan Eyer-Anderson is a California artist known for her oil and acrylic paintings that depict horses, wildlife, landscapes, and evocative western subjects. A realist artist, she often works from photographic references. She uses rich color and pays careful attention to light, form, and detail. She desires to capture both likeness and the heart and energy of her subjects.
Marla Epstein • California • waow
Marla Epstein is an oil painter and sculptor. Her art primarily features animals, both wild and domestic. Her style blends realism with expressive presence. She does not always seek to depict every detail, but strives to convey each creature’s character and vitality, rendered with strong presence and expressive technique, exploring their strength, beauty, and freedom. Her process commonly involves observing, photographing, and researching the animal subjects before creating her artworks. Many of her paintings emphasize a close, personal scale with the animals filling the canvas.
Carlota Estevez • Minnesota • waow
Carlota Estevez is an artist from Argentina living in Minnesota since 1995. She is experienced in using multiple media, and is not afraid of mixing materials and techniques from different traditions. She loves painting from life, be it en plein air or still life. Her favorite theme is how light moves and changes within the visual space. Her paintings elude becoming a perfect copy of reality. She, instead, focuses on what is vital to make each painting "breathe in its own air".
Maggie Rosché • Colorado • waow
Maggie Rosché is a contemporary visual artist known for her landscape and wildlife paintings. She primarily paints Colorado mountain landscapes and native wildlife, often with a sense of emotional strength and healing. Everyone has their own “Everest.” The mountains symbolize the hardships that people have had to overcome and conquer in their lives. It is a record of their personal journey and triumph.
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.
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.
Martha Inman Lorch • California • waow
Martha Inman Lorch is known for watercolors of her favorite places. She is inspired by her international travels, as well as her experiences closer to home. Her style is representational, with a touch of abstract expressionism. She uses layering, wet-in-wet techniques, and visual texture to express the soulfulness she feels for her subjects.
Kathy LeJeune • Louisiana • waow
Kathy LeJeune is a self-taught artist who works in pastel, graphite and charcoal. Her drawings reflect the important role horses played in her early life — if she wasn’t riding them, she was drawing them. She spent wonderful childhood days riding at local playdays and along country roads or in pastures. Raising a family and teaching in Louisiana schools necessitated a break from drawing, but she found comfort and joy when she picked up her pencils again during the Covid pandemic. She has not put them down since. Her artistic output includes sympathetic drawings of horses and their pivotal role in western life and rodeo competitions. Cowboys and cows get some gritty starring roles, too.
Marie Kash Weltzheimer • Oklahoma • waow
Marie Kash Weltzheimer is a representational artist whose work reflects inspirations from music and nature. She has a long history working with pastel, drawing mediums, and oils. Common themes she explores are people, portraits, and still life, along with an occasional venture into landscapes. Some of her recent still life compositions resemble nests. These are symbolic to the important core value of family structure that is deeply felt, since she built her family by adoption. A sense of order, color, love, security and support is built into the compositions.
Heather R. Kaiser • Oklahoma • waow
Heather R. Kaiser is an accomplished artist, renowned for her award-winning sculptures. Her work is primarily rendered in bronze. She often depicts Native Americans and historical Western scenes. She captures the layers of attitude, emotion and personality of her subjects, showcasing her deep appreciation for their strength of spirit.
Renée Kelleher • California • waow
Renée Kelleher is an impressionist oil painter who finds delight in beautiful surroundings wherever she lives or travels. Big city skylines, hillside vineyards, restaurant and chapel interiors, and corner flower markets inspire her alike.
Joanne Lavender • Colorado • waow
Joanne Lavender is an impressionist painter. She paints the open spaces of the West with simple abstract shapes and values that reflect her early training in graphic design. She chooses to compose her representation of the land emphasizing the quality of light that defines the shapes before her, rather than execute a literal copy of what she sees.