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.

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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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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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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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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Liz Bonham • Texas • waow

Her early career began when she was 15 and working as a pastel portrait artist at Six Flags.  After college, she worked as an illustrator in the children's and gift book market.  Her paintings have graced many books, including her Gold Medallion winner, "The Crippled Lamb", by Max Lucado, and her Silver Medallion winner and Angel Award or Excellence in Media winner, "Timeless Moments", by Alton Howard. Her book "The Crippled Lamb" has sold almost two million copies.  The collector edition of this book includes songs and the story recorded by the voice of Jodi Benson, the voice of "The Little Mermaid". Her books are sold around the world in different languages and her publishers include Harper Collins, Scholastic, Word, Howard and Chariot Victor.  She has also been National Show Artist for the Appaloosa Journal Magazine and was featured in the magazine. 

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Dee Kirkham • Nevada • waow

Dee Kirkham is an accomplished artist, living in the foothills of the Lake Tahoe National Forest in Nevada and has been flourishing as a distinguished fine arts oil painter for over 40 years.  Her exceptional talent in still life, figurative and plein air has put her in the forefront of the American Art Scene, won her many awards, and given her the opportunity to share her passion with students.  Her motto is “Art is my God given passion and journey – more fulfilling and beautiful shared than alone”.

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Reneé Marz Mullis • New Mexico • waow

Reneé Marz Mullis is mesmerized by the pastel stick’s strength of color and brilliancy.   She paints southwestern landscapes, interiors and exteriors, florals, and still lifes, both in the studio and en plein air.  She most enjoys the multitude of challenges in conveying a strong sense of luminosity and atmosphere in her work. 

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Anna Lisa Leal • Texas • waow

Texas pastel artist, Anna Lisa Leal, honors the fierce beauty of the botanical wonders of Texas, and the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts; as well as the wildlife and found objects found in these regions. The textures and tenacity of life in these harsh areas inspire raw, radiant stories painted from her heart to represent the spirit of the American Southwest. 

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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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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. 

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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.

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Linda Star Landon • Arizona • waow

Linda Star Landon, has always created art in one form or another.  Her oil paintings are distinguished by her signature style use of vivid colors and bold textures created using a palette knife technique. 

Landon’s creations have been exhibited at juried art shows and have been recognized as Best of Show and won awards.  The artworks are loved by their collectors all over the United States.  Some have gone to other countries including Canada and China. 

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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.

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Anne Spoon • Oklahoma • waow

Anne Spoon is a realist oil painter.  She has spent the past two decades painting people, places and objects that have a quiet beauty; that are, perhaps, seemingly simple, and often overlooked until painted.  Her skillfully painted works have a dreamlike, soft quality that invites the viewer to linger and look more closely.   She attended The School of Visual Arts at Bronx, New York. 

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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.   

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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.

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Terry Denson • Florida • waow

Terry Denson creates paintings that are vibrant and realistic, with just a touch of abstraction.  She seeks to capture the dramatic contrast between color saturated subjects and deep shadows. 

Denson began her career as a full–time artist in 2003.  She was initially self–taught, but has taken opportunities to study in workshops throughout the country with nationally recognized artists, and attended formal drawing instruction at several schools in Maryland, including the Maryland Institute, College of Art.

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Margie Hildreth • Texas • waow

Margie Hildreth is a watercolor artist who loves the way the medium moves and blends.  It is a medium that requires a collaboration of sorts — a dance between artistic control and then allowing the serendipitous play of water and pigment to surprise and delight.  She uses vibrant color to show the contrast of light and shadow and likes to drop in unexpected colors or splatter to evoke a sense of casual fun in her paintings. 

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