I don’t know which I loved more as a child, my art supplies, or my stick horses. I blame television’s Roy Rogers and Trigger for the horse obsession. Over time, I gradually began drawing realistic horses, and got more and more infatuated with the pencils. While I still love the challenge of manipulating graphite between whispers of gray and the blackest of blacks, I have a fascination with new media and drawing surfaces. Cheryl Harley Volz

Donna Merchant-Crooks has a kinship with nature, where she finds solace and inspiration. She spent years cooking and pulling mule strings in Idaho’s wilderness, developing an appreciation for the rare and untouched.

Margaret strives for accuracy as well as aesthetics when creating realistic figures of animals and humans. Originally from Northwestern Colorado ranching country, Margaret first learned she had a propensity for sculpting after she retired from working 30 years in research in the pharmaceutical industry.

Brenda Morgan works from her studio in Dardanelle, Arkansas.

She has always gravitated toward the western genre and artists such as James Bama and Carl Brenders inspired her to paint realism. Having a love of equine subjects, adding cowboys, cowgirls and Indigenous Americans seemed a natural progression.

Vicki Pedersen has a life-long passion for art.  She feels so fortunate that she is living the dream -- painting what she loves.  She focuses mostly on painting the American West -- cowboys and cowgirls, Native Americans, and the beautiful landscapes of deserts, mountains, and everything in between.  She works primarily in oils but also loves to work in graphite and charcoal.  Traveling throughout the west enables her to paint from life and take the photos she uses as reference for her paintings. The West offers an endless source of inspiration for her work. Its people and landscapes are what make western art both timeless and compelling.

Mejo’s studio walls are covered in paintings of cowboys and their horses, prize cattle, and agave cactus. She has worked as a graphic designer, illustrator, costume manager for traveling Broadway shows, and a courtroom sketch artist. Her inner voice said, ‘Paint. Run away and paint,’and since settling in New Mexico, she has found endless inspiration in cowboys, ranches and the landscape but then again, she has always loved horses and animals.