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.

Molly Sims • Washington • waow

Molly Sims is a classical realist oil painter who specializes in depicting wildlife and birds.  She wants her paintings to feel real and lifelike and to impart a view of the beauty and innocence that she sees.  She usually prefers to have a single focus in her works, so she sometimes keeps her backgrounds loose and amorphous.   

Read More

Jan McKay • Oklahoma • waow

Jan McKay feels her paintings of wildlife, pets, and nature, are the perfect subjects to display the beauty of creation, and the love we have been given from above.  She was an interior designer for 26 years.  This experience developed her natural eye for beauty and design. This skill translates into her paintings.

Read More

Yun Wei • California • waow

Yun Wei is a representational painter who uses traditional oil painting techniques in all of her work.  She is deeply inspired by Dutch Golden Age still life masters such as Willem Kalf and Willem Claeszoon Heda—artists known for their rich textures, finely rendered objects, and quiet emotional resonance.  She has received awards for excellence and best-in-show in various juried exhibitions.  Her work has also been featured in respected art publications such as Western Art Collector, Art of the West, Southwest Art, and Fine Art Connoisseur.

Read More

Brenda Whicker • Indiana • waow

Brenda Whicker is an impressionist painter of still life, horses and landscapes known for her painterly brushwork and her use of rich, dramatic color.  Farm life, changing seasons, and the effects of natural light are recurring themes and inspiration in her oil and acrylic paintings.  She is influenced by traditional still life painting from the Dutch Masters of the 1600s to French Academics of the 1900s. 

Read More

Susan Hediger Matteson • Colorado • waow

Susan Hediger Matteson is a contemporary oil painter who focuses on landscapes, outdoor scenes and animals.  Her work is celebrated for its quiet light, atmospheric quality, and representational beauty.  She paints en plein air and uses her studies and sketches made on location as inspiration for her studio work.

Read More

Andrea Stanley • California • waow

Andrea Stanley’s paintings are a reflection of her fascination with light and color, which stems from years of affection for and study of impressionist and post-impressionist artists of Europe, as well as turn-of-the-century artists of California. She admires artists as diverse as Ingres, Van Gogh, and Sorolla.  Her works include landscapes, still life, figurative, and western subjects in oil, charcoal, and pencil.

Read More

Cheryl Koen • Texas • waow

Whether it is the poetry of a mustang in gallop or the sublime beauty of the southwestern landscape, Cheryl Koen’s paintings reflect the spirit of the west and its inhabitants. The wide–open spaces conveyed in her work are meant to invoke a feeling of nostalgic connection with the wild west and dreams of times past and present.

Read More

Pamela Mangelsdorf • Arizona • waow

Although I have been painting professionally since 2005, my excitement for art has spanned many more years. In particular I have enjoyed drawing and painting animals – wild and domestic, large or small since my college days. It is a joy for me to be able to depict wildlife in their natural surroundings.

Nearly all of my paintings are in oil or watercolor. Over the years, I have developed techniques that suit my style of realism. I try to portray each of the animals in as realistic a manner as possible…the details of their feathers, the colors of their coats, and the brilliance of their eyes. There is nothing so penetrating and expressive as an animal’s eyes which is why I concentrate on faithfully depicting that window into their world.

Read More

Beverly Endsley • Colorado • waow

Beverly Endsley’s art journey began with the isolation brought on by childhood illness and her bonding with a gentle friend — a pet rabbit.  She developed a deep empathy for animals in that crucible that informs her paintings.   She is a classically trained artist known for her expressive oil paintings, watercolors, and sketches that capture the unique spirit of pets and wildlife.  Her impressionist style lends a sense of immediacy and mystique, encouraging viewer participation in discovering each animal's story.  She specializes in commissioned pet portraits that honor the human–animal bond.

Read More

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.

Read More

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. 

Read More

Cheryl King • Washington • waow

Cheryl King has an ongoing love affair with art and wildlife that has spanned more than thirty years.   She is best known for her expressive representations of animals and nature.  Her constant goal is to honor the animal she is painting, while infusing fun-loving, bold, honest and energetic qualities to her depictions.  King paints primarily in oils on aluminum or with mixed media.

Read More

Tina Garrett • Missouri • waow

Tina Garrett is a contemporary American oil painter and portrait/figurative artist known for her emotionally resonant, dramatic artworks.   Her contemporary realist paintings exude emotional presence and psychological depth through her evocative use of light, color and atmospheric quality.  Collectors and critics alike note her ability to blend technical excellence with a poetic sensibility.  She is recognized as one of the leading women in contemporary representational art. 

Read More

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.

Read More

Lauri Ketchum • Oklahoma • waow

Lauri Ketchum's agricultural roots and life-long love affair with the American cowboy have fueled her concentration in Western Art.  Ketchum loves capturing the essence of hard–working ranchers and sharing the ranching lifestyle through her art.  She began her art career working in watercolor and acrylics before settling on oil as her preferred medium.  Ketchum is largely self-taught and has refined her skills through workshops with artists she admires. 

Read More

Danielle Kirby • Wyoming • waow

Danielle Kirby is a Western landscape and fine art painter known for her richly colored, dramatic depictions of the skies, land, wildlife and light of the American West, especially the wide–open plains of southeastern Wyoming.  Her oil paintings are noted for saturated, high–contrast color palettes and dramatic use of light, coupled with expressive brushwork and artistic interpretation.

Read More

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.

Read More

Kay Juricek • Colorado • waow

Kay Juricek primarily paints landscapes of the American West, with a particular fascination for areas in Colorado like the San Luis Valley and North Park. Her oil paintings highlight the open, expansive beauty of these regions — vast vistas, light-filled skies, and scenes that inspire a sense of peace and spiritual connection to the land. She strives to capture both the transcendent beauty and the emotional essence of these places.  Her artistic voice reflects her personal experience, treating scenic views with a blend of realism and emotional depth inspired by the memory of her experience with the site.

Read More

Grace Schlesier • California • waow

Grace Schlesier is a well-established American artist whose impressionistic oil paintings celebrate the beauty, mood and light of the natural world.  Her work focuses on western landscapes, coastal scenes, wilderness areas, rivers, and the sea, with an emphasis on the feeling and atmosphere of a place.  Her paintings are noted for a soft, luminous quality that evoke peace and tranquility.  Schlesier’s work draws on her direct experience with nature and a long career painting both en plein-air and in studio. 

Read More

Vanessa Rusczyk • California • waow

Vanessa Rusczyk paints the unique and resilient flora of desert landscapes.  She creates realistic yet interpretive oil paintings that emphasize the character of Western flora through bold, heightened color, strong value contrasts, and compositions with minimal backgrounds, allowing plant life to take center stage in her floral portraits.  She works out of her studio in suburban San Diego, surrounded by native chaparral and open spaces that grace her artworks.   Her latest wilderness explorations have expanded to include the Colorado Plateau and high deserts of New Mexico. Her artistic journey reflects her deep connection to the southwestern landscape and her commitment to showcasing the often over–looked natural beauty of its plant life.  She aims to inspire appreciation and protection of the plants that thrive in these wild spaces.

Read More