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.

Rhonda Williams • Oklahoma• waow

Rhonda was born and raised in Bartlesville,Oklahoma and has a BS in Art Education from Oklahoma State University and hours toward a minor in printmaking. She is married to Paul and has four grown children. Rhonda has lived in Verdigris, Owasso, Oologah and Bartlesville in Oklahoma. She has worked as an  Advanced Placement High School Art Teacher as well as teaching art at both the elementary and middle school levels. Throughout the years Rhonda has worked as both a commercial artist as well as a fine artist. Since retiring from teaching in 2020, she has been concentrating on her work as a fine artist, painting commissioned artwork in oil paint. Rhonda is a current member of the Bartlesville Art Association.

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Audrey Caylor • Texas • waow

Audrey Caylor is an award–winning contemporary wildlife and western artist.  Her medium of choice is oil with a heavy bold brush and palette knife technique through which she explores the beauty of wildlife and how the simplicity of one brush stroke can depict that.   The purpose of her work is to capture the feeling or the spirit of the animal with a simple glance.

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Kristen Freeborn • California • waow

Every day in America, there is a tragic loss of family owned, working ranches. Through my paintings, I am trying to capture this lifestyle, before it disappears altogether. I want to provide a window into a world of how the ranchers work, and to commemorate the disappearing landscape, animals, ranchers and traditional tools of their trade.

I have lived all my life near the border of North Dakota and Montana, and it is in this area I spend time on these vanishing ranches.

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Daphne Clark • North Dakota • waow

Every day in America, there is a tragic loss of family owned, working ranches. Through my paintings, I am trying to capture this lifestyle, before it disappears altogether. I want to provide a window into a world of how the ranchers work, and to commemorate the disappearing landscape, animals, ranchers and traditional tools of their trade.

I have lived all my life near the border of North Dakota and Montana, and it is in this area I spend time on these vanishing ranches.

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Deborah Day • California • waow

Deborah Day is an accomplished horsewoman, nature enthusiast, passionate painter and registered nurse. She has combined these interests to create a multifaceted career. Artistically, much of her inspiration comes from outside her back door where the Rockin’ D Ranch is home to about 20 horses and various other animals. She has a deep, lifelong love for horses and they are frequently depicted in her work. Other animals, mostly of the domestic sort, find place in sharing her life in and out of the studio as well.

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Karen Storm • Colorado • waow

Karen Storm is a contemporary oil painter known for landscape and nature paintings created en plein air and in her studio.  Her style is a combination of representational and impressionist influences with which she focuses on her emotional connection to nature through her expression of light, color and atmosphere.    

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Becky Hicks • Texas • waow

Becky Hicks’ love affair with painting cattle started with the summers and holidays spent on her great grandmother’s ranch.  She spent hours with scissors and stacks of The Cattleman magazines cutting pictures of cows, barns and fences.  Little did she know then that her painting, Gold in the Morning Son, would be featured on the cover someday.  In addition to cattle, Hicks also paints and draws the western and ranch lifestyles, Native Americans, animals and wildlife in oils, watercolors and charcoal. 

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Margi Tucker • Arkansas • waow

Margi Tucker is a contemporary pastel artist known for her nature-inspired artworks.  Her work often blends detailed realism with symbolic or spiritual narrative in her quest to capture the essence or spirit of her subject and its surroundings.  Her drive is to preserve the species or scene in her art, as such may not exist in years to come. 

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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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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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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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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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