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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sue Wipf • Minnesota • waow
Sue Wipf worked on her parents' farm and spent time pondering the skies and the beauty around her. That experience continues to influence her values and her perspective on the world around her. Her love for nature is expressed in her plein air paintings and studio work. The artworks of Vermeer, Sargent, Turner, and Sorolla have influenced her. She has studied at the Schroeder Studio and taken workshops from other master artists.
Lisa Rico • California • waow
Lisa Rico loves the immediacy of pastels and richness of the color possibilities achievable with them. The face is her favorite subject — specifically, the faces of people from other cultures and countries encountered on her travels. Rico also enjoys featuring local flora and fauna in colorful paintings as well as doing sanguine sketches and quick studies.
Kristen Federchuk • Canada • waow
Kristin Federchuk a self-taught artist. She practiced drawing by studying the works of artists she admired. She feels that her art career is what she was created to do. She experiences great joy and excitement as she brings each painting to its ultimate fruition. Federchuk’s subjects are varied, preferring to be free to explore and paint the beauty around her.
Sharon Grubbs • North Carolina • waow
Sharon Grubbs finds inspiration in people and places throughout North Carolina’s Piedmont region. Her paintings range from traditional rural landscapes and images of local farmers, representing the area’s strong agricultural roots, to works featuring members of the many ethnic groups who have introduced new cultures to the area, even as they become an integral part of it.
Barbara Nuss • Maryland • waow
Barbara Nuss is an award–winning oil painter of landscapes and still life scenes. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree Syracuse University, the Schuler School of Fine Arts in Baltimore. She began her art career at a graphic artist and illustrator.
Nuss is the author of the book, Secrets to Composition. She taught still life and landscape painting at her atelier from 1983 to 1996. She continues to share her skills through plein air workshops and atelier teaching.
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.
Sharon Markwardt • New Mexico • waow
Sharon Markwardt is a life-long artist with a Fine Art degree and a Biology minor. She grew up in Texas, the daughter of an Artist and an Engineer, and now enjoys an artist's life in Santa Fe, NM. The colorful style for which she is known emerged in the last decade or so, and paralleled her entrance into horsemanship, with its associated injuries and challenges. She laughingly credits her mare with “throwing her into western art!" since her colorful style emerged after a fall. She had the courage to get back in the saddle, and eventually learned the value of calm assertiveness. A new boldness entered her art, and she moved from watercolor to oils. Her color perception altered, as did her subject matter: stronger, brighter, more Western. Sharon enjoys pushing her colors and designs while retaining realism and attention to detail, injecting humor whenever possible.
Elizabeth Rouland • Colorado • waow
Elizabeth Rouland O'Dell earned her B.A. in art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, graduating with honors in 1991. She worked with printmaking techniques including intaglio etching, drypoint, and monotypes during her college years. More recently, she has returned to focus on oil painting, and she is ever enthralled with the challenge of interpreting the world around her through color and texture.
Rose Irelan • California • waow
Rose Irelan is inspired by the diverse landscapes of the coast, desert, and mountains. Her paintings capture the energy and changing light of the natural world, using expressive brushwork and a deep appreciation for color. Whether painting the rugged shoreline, the quiet beauty of a desert morning, or towering mountains, she strives to convey the feeling of a moment rather than just a scene.
Lori Cusick • Texas • waow
Lori Cusick loves to create art of the land. Her style is colorful and stylized. She received her Bachelors of Fine Art degree from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
Her process begins on location with oil paints and canvas in tow. Leaving the studio behind and working in the great outdoors provides and endless source of inspiration.
Lani Browning • Maryland • waow
Lani Browning, an award winning plein air oil painter for over twenty– five years, is known for her distinctive skill with colors, and the quiet elegance and soft tonalism of her paintings. Her travels around the country and abroad, and her love of the land have contributed to her focus on the landscape. Her years of experience show in her confident and mature brushwork.