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.

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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Joy Gonzalez • California • waow

I have always loved the creative process, currently including painting in oils, pastels and watercolor.  In my artwork, I try to convey my deep appreciation of the natural world. I hope my paintings share the excitement I feel outdoors and the exuberance of creative activity.

On my best painting days, I lose track of time and get into the flow of what I am doing, then look up and discover that I have been painting all day.  My favorite subjects are landscapes, often small paintings painted plein air or larger paintings painted from my plein air studies. I love the richness and depth of oil on canvas and I also love the fluidity and delicacy of watercolor on paper. I have recently added pastels to my repertoire and I'm becoming comfortable with them.

If I can give the viewer a magical view of a special place and time of day, my art has fulfilled its purpose. Joy Gonzalez

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Patricia Ridge Bradley • Oklahoma • waow

Patricia Ridge Bradley is a representational fine artist known for her work in charcoal, pastel, oil, and acrylic.  She produces portraits, figures, still life, landscapes, streetscapes, and Western-themed subjects that range from loose, spontaneous expression to meticulously detailed renderings.

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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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Linda Harrison–Parsons • Arizona • waow

Linda Harrison-Parsons is an award–winning artist whose work is inspired by the natural world. She creates her works from what she sees in nature and documents moments in time of those things that may be gone tomorrow.    All of her work is based on her strength in drawing while using her background in design and printmaking to create striking images.  She works in water-based oils, pencils, or in soft pastel with handmade papers to achieve her desired effects.  Her travels around the work influence her bodies of work, with each new adventure opening a new series.

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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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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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Deborah LaFogg–Docherty • Florida • waow

Deborah LaFogg–Docherty is best known for her detailed, photorealistic paintings that celebrate wildlife, landscapes and the natural world.  She works in pastel, oil, and acrylic.  Her art practice is driven by a lifelong commitment to nature and conservation. She has participated in artist expeditions, including conservation-focused travels to Kenya to support efforts for endangered species.

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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. 

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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.

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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.   

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Cecy Turner • Texas & Colorado • waow

Cecy Turner is an award-winning artist who works in both watercolor and oil.   She prefers to paint en plein air, and does so almost daily   since she began spending half of every year in Colorado.   The effects of light and atmosphere are her favorite things to capture in paint.

Turner graduated from Vanderbilt University and did post-graduate study in art at University of North Texas.  She has additionally studied under numerous accomplished artists in both oil and watercolor

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Diane Fechenbach • Colorado • waow

Diane Fechenbach’s artistic passion is dramatic light and shadow; and clean, saturated color.  She is particularly interested in the effect of light on snow, trees, rocks and water.  She works in a variety of media, including pastel, oil, and watercolor. Her subjects are varied, but she particularly enjoys painting en plein air.

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Judy Fairley • Washington • waow

Judy Fairley is pastel and scratchboard artist, living and working in Washington.  She grew up in Clarkston, where she and her twin sister helped on the family's horse and cattle ranch. Her experiences while growing up provided her with endless inspiration that she has shared in her numerous artworks shown and exhibited throughout the United States and Canada.

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Mary Lou Pape • Kansas • waow

Mary Lou Pape’s passion for nature has made wildlife and the western way of life the primary focus of her artistic practice.  Her primary mediums are oil, pastel and pencil.  Travels to national parks, nature preserves, rodeos and ranches in America continually provide her with inspiration for her paintings of life in our remarkable country.  

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Christine Obers • California • waow

Christine Obers is a realist artist working in pastel, colored pencils and oils.  She creates beautifully sensitive paintings of animals, people, landscapes and still life.  She likes to use photographs for her initial inspiration.  She then edits and enhances them to create pleasing compositions that create rich emotional connections with her subjects.

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Landscapes, Skyscapes, Pastels WAOW . Landscapes, Skyscapes, Pastels WAOW .

Katherine Irish • New Mexico • waow

Katherine Irish made a conscious decision to contribute beauty to the world through art when she returned to New Mexico. The infinite variety of color and abstract patterns found in New Mexico skies offer a limitless source of inspiration. Cloud composition and colors are ephemeral. However, what is constant is that the beginning and end of each day is marked by the rising and setting of the sun. The beauty found in the skies inspires us.  Irish’s paintings are an effort to bring focused attention on our shared connection with the natural order.

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Natalie Campbell • California • waow

Natalie Campbell captures the beauty of the world around her, primarily working with pastels on black paper.  She infuses each piece with the same passion and energy that drives her. Despite being new to the art world, she is already a nationally award-winning artist and has shown her work locally, nationally and internationally. Natalie looks forward to continuing to exhibit her artwork around the country

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