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.

Beverly Endsley • Colorado • waow

Beverly Endsley’s art journey began with the isolation brought on by childhood illness and her bonding with a gentle friend — a pet rabbit.  She developed a deep empathy for animals in that crucible that informs her paintings.   She is a classically trained artist known for her expressive oil paintings, watercolors, and sketches that capture the unique spirit of pets and wildlife.  Her impressionist style lends a sense of immediacy and mystique, encouraging viewer participation in discovering each animal's story.  She specializes in commissioned pet portraits that honor the human–animal bond.

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Joy Gonzalez • California • waow

Joy Gonzalez is a contemporary southern California artist.  She works in oils, watercolor and pastel.  Her work predominately centers on landscapes and seascapes — especially scenes from Coastal California, the Sierra Nevada, and Southwestern United States.  She prefers to paint en plein air to capture shifting light and atmosphere.  She will then expand those studies into larger studio works. Her style balances expressive brushwork with a strong sense of realism.

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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. 

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Cheryl King • Washington • waow

Cheryl King has an ongoing love affair with art and wildlife that has spanned more than thirty years.   She is best known for her expressive representations of animals and nature.  Her constant goal is to honor the animal she is painting, while infusing fun-loving, bold, honest and energetic qualities to her depictions.  King paints primarily in oils on aluminum or with mixed media.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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Danielle Kirby • Wyoming • waow

Danielle Kirby is a Western landscape and fine art painter known for her richly colored, dramatic depictions of the skies, land, wildlife and light of the American West, especially the wide–open plains of southeastern Wyoming.  Her oil paintings are noted for saturated, high–contrast color palettes and dramatic use of light, coupled with expressive brushwork and artistic interpretation.

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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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Kay Juricek • Colorado • waow

Kay Juricek primarily paints landscapes of the American West, with a particular fascination for areas in Colorado like the San Luis Valley and North Park. Her oil paintings highlight the open, expansive beauty of these regions — vast vistas, light-filled skies, and scenes that inspire a sense of peace and spiritual connection to the land. She strives to capture both the transcendent beauty and the emotional essence of these places.  Her artistic voice reflects her personal experience, treating scenic views with a blend of realism and emotional depth inspired by the memory of her experience with the site.

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Grace Schlesier • California • waow

Grace Schlesier is a well-established American artist whose impressionistic oil paintings celebrate the beauty, mood and light of the natural world.  Her work focuses on western landscapes, coastal scenes, wilderness areas, rivers, and the sea, with an emphasis on the feeling and atmosphere of a place.  Her paintings are noted for a soft, luminous quality that evoke peace and tranquility.  Schlesier’s work draws on her direct experience with nature and a long career painting both en plein-air and in studio. 

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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Paula B. Holtzclaw • North Carolina • waow

American Contemporary artist, Paula Holtzclaw, has gained a national reputation for her ability to capture the drama of nature on canvas. She is widely known for her luminous landscapes that feature her masterful use of color, light, mood, atmosphere, and composition. These works reflect a deep connection to unspoiled nature.  Her still life paintings blend an impressionistic flair with classical realism influenced by her love of the Old Masters’ works.  Holtzclaw’s dedication to her craft and continuous pursuit of artistic growth have made her a respected figure among her peers.

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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.

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