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.
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.
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.
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.
Burneta Venosdel • Oklahoma • waow
Burneta Venosdel is a national, award-winning bronze sculptor and pastel painter. Many of her sculpture subjects are inspired by her surroundings and life on her Oklahoma ranch. She paints the landscapes of western Oklahoma and the wildflowers from the mountains west of Gunnison that she has trod for over 20 years.
Jennifer Hunter • Illinois • waow
Nationally recognized, award–winning artist, Jennifer Hunter, is known for her sensitive storytelling of American history through her art work. Her paintings exude unique quality of light and rich luminous color in both watercolor and oil. Hunter finds that her working knowledge of the use of transparency in watercolor enhances her oil painting techniques; and working in oil allows for experimentation with textured surfaces using both transparency and opacity of paint to give life to her work.
Leslie Lambert • Idaho & Washington • waow
Leslie Lambert (also known as Leslie Redhead) is a celebrated artist known for her innovative poured watercolors. With a keen eye for detail and a mastery of color, Lambert skillfully pours and manipulates pigments on paper, resulting in stunning and dynamic compositions of the West. Her artwork, characterized by vibrant hues, has garnered widespread acclaim and has been exhibited in prestigious galleries and exhibitions worldwide. Lambert’s ability to push the boundaries of traditional watercolor painting has established her as a trail blazer in the arts.
Barbara Ellis • Vermont • waow
Barbara Ellis is a classically-trained academic realist painter. Her artwork celebrates the beauty of the natural world in all its variety — from delicate mare and foal scenes, to wildlife and rural animal scenes, to classical portraits and still lives. Ellis seeks to capture the beauty, dignity, and personalities of her subjects in her oil and acrylic paintings. Horses are an especially loved subject. She has spent years working to perfect her craft to achieve anatomical accuracy while expressing equine fire and elegance.
Shuli Wang • Illinois • waow
Shuli Wang is an accomplished artist residing in the vibrant Chicago metropolitan area. She was born in Inner Mongolia, China. She exhibited exceptional talent and an unwavering passion for the world of drawing and painting from an early age. Wang possesses a remarkable versatility, working fluently with an array of artistic mediums including pencil, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, and oil. Her artistic style can be aptly described as impressionistic realism, where vibrant brushwork often reminiscent of traditional Chinese freehand paintings infuses life into her creations. The subjects of her work are as diverse as her mediums, spanning landscapes, still life, and portraiture.
Crystal DeSpain • Colorado • waow
Crystal DeSpain's paintings are a study of contrasts, where tension meets whimsy, technical precision meets poetic expression, and a compelling story lies alongside an unanswered question. She consistently marries classical representation with modern sensibilities, a duality that is central to her artistic vision. Her creative process is an intense and focused one, fueled by disciplined observation and a fearless embrace of trial and error.
Kathy Gale • Idaho • waow
Kathy Gale creates contemporary art that is a fusion of impressionism and abstraction. She tells the stories of farmers, migrant workers, and ranch hands at work set against the sweeping vistas of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana. She uses a variety of media to achieve her characteristic broken color that lends richness and texture to her painting surfaces, including oils, acrylics, gouache, watercolor and pastels.