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.

Melanie Chambers Hartman • Arizona • waow

A Texas native, Tina Bohlman has used her home state as both the inspiration and the canvas for her art.  A self-taught artist, Bohlman is well versed in several mediums but favors watercolor and oil to create breath–taking plein air paintings and brilliant rural landscapes. 

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Victoria Castillo • Texas • waow

Victoria Castillo is a figurative painter whose work focuses on women in light-infused settings, usually gardens and intimate interiors. She studied painting at Washington & Lee University and at the University of Maryland, graduating with honors.  After college, Victoria has lived and worked in both Europe and the US. Most recently, she completed an intensive, classical, live model painting and drawing program at Studio Escalier in France.

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Janis Blayer • Arizona • waow

Janis Casco-Blayer’s studio and plein air paintings from the Northwest, Arizona, Hawaii and abroad reflect diversity in her paintings. She has worked in a variety of mediums including oil, watercolor, zinc plate etching and bronze sculpture among others. Blayer’s impressionistic style captures the spirit of animals, people and landscapes with uncanny precision and emotion. Her recent move to Buckeye, Arizona has ushered in a new era of creativity, infusing her artwork with captivating southwest landscapes, cowboys, horses, and rodeo scenes. 

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Debbie Carroll • Texas • waow

The work of Debbie Carroll is about expressing what she observes when surveying the West and Southwest regions of the United States. The challenge is to draw out the intrinsic beauty of the ordinary and often overlooked.  She strives to elevate her subjects in her painting — not to show the obvious, but to reveal the extraordinariness of what is familiar.  Travel is the backbone of Carroll’s work.  She feels it throws her into new circumstances and surroundings, bringing new inspiration to take home to share through her studio work. 

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Andi Burnum • Colorado • waow

Andi Burnum finds herself continually drawing inspiration from her love for the American West. She grew up on the high plains of Kansas where she spent a majority of her time outside, in and around nature and her family's cows.  Burnam’s love for animals, both domestic and wild, knows no bounds. Her pieces are usually a mixture of moments that she has loved, combined with her need to create semi-realistic and detailed art.

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Judith Brunko • Colorado & Arizona • waow

Judith Brunko loves the dramatic movement of the human figure and how it relates to the landscape of Colorado and Arizona, which she calls home. The people of the West and Southwest are what fuels her art.  She portrays the figure in dance or costume evoking an emotion of time and place. Utilizing color, form and delicate brush strokes she creates a story.

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Jean Apgar • Illinois • waow

reating my art is as much a part of me as breathing. My inspiration comes from the small, even insignificant, things that surround us in everyday life. I earned my B.F.A. and M.A. degrees in painting from Northern Illinois University. My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in private and corporate collections in the United States, Sweden, France, Luxembourg, Germany, Australia and Great Britain. My paintings were selected for the American Embassy Residences in Rangoon, Burma and Niger, Africa, under the Art in Embassies program initiated by President John F. Kennedy. I am listed in Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who in America, receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award. I co-authored the book, “Now What? This Art Business.” My work is included in the books, “The Best of Silk Painting,” and “The Fine Art of Painting on Silk”. I am represented by Abel Contemporary Gallery, Stoughton, WI, 317 Art Collective, Rockford, IL, and JR Finally Art, Rockton, IL and am a member of artists’ organizations including WAOW, TWSA, NWS, SPIN and the Art Guild of Rockford.

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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. 

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Yvonne Bonacci • California • waow

Yvonne was born and raised on a cattle ranch.  Horses and art have always been her passion.  It's no surprise horses and people are her favorite subject.  Many of her works are done on commission. She has taught workshops in the community for over 25 years.  She works in a variety of mediums, and has won many awards over the years.  Yvonne was inducted into the Elk Grove Community Hall of Fame for her accomplishments as an artist in 2020.  Her paintings have hung at the California State Capital and at Washington D.C.

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Tina Bohlman • Texas • waow

A Texas native, Tina Bohlman has used her home state as both the inspiration and the canvas for her art.  A self-taught artist, Bohlman is well versed in several mediums but favors watercolor and oil to create breath–taking plein air paintings and brilliant rural landscapes. 

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Denise Horne-Kaplan • North Carolina & Florida • waow

Denise Horne-Kaplan started her professional career in 1983.  She has participated in exhibits and juried shows — over 74 national and International juried shows and eight solo shows to date.  She is in six international publications, including being a featured centerfold Artist with thirteen paintings in the 1999 Winter Issue of Watercolor magazine.  Horne-Kaplan is a signature member, one of only 130 in the country, of the Miniature Artists of America. 

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Carolyn C. Bell • Texas • waow

Carolyn C. Bell, an award–winning Texas artist, fell in love with the southwest’s vast landscape upon moving to Texas at the age of eight.  Her love of the southwest landscape has been translated into many artworks that depict the myriad colors, rocks, and foliage that has caught her eye and heart.  Southwestern Spanish architecture and the Spanish missions of Texas and New Mexico are also cherished subjects, along with florals, wildlife and still life.

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Nanette Biers • California • waow

Nanette Biers is a Northern California painter with a rich and varied background of professional achievement. She received her Bachelor's degree in Fine Art with honors from UC Berkeley. Starting in 1980, for the next three decades she pursued a career as a freelance commercial illustrator, working through her NYC agents, Morgan Gaynin, Inc., and garnering awards and appearances in several prestigious illustration annuals. She became known for her painterly realism, working exclusively in oils. Today her paintings can be found in private and corporate collections around the country.

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Bruce Bingham • Texas • waow

Having completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Oklahoma in 1978, Bruce Bingham has pursued further education by attending over 36 workshops and courses taught by renowned artists from around the globe. Bruce has recently returned to the United States after spending a decade living abroad and has chosen to settle in the vibrant city of Austin. Embracing the city's eclectic atmosphere, Bruce finds inspiration in capturing the local color and unique venues that Keep Austin Weird!   Bingham paints in lush, sensual oils that don’t just depict life...they celebrate it. Every brushstroke is a tribute to the beauty we often overlook. And every piece is a portal—to feeling more, noticing more, living more.

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Iwona Jankowski • Texas • waow

My “Mottled Art” – Equine art developed since 2002 in my new “Mottled” style that merges abstract and expressionism with a touch of realism.
The subject is created on a colorful abstract background to express feelings, often shown as a close-up,
with special attention to the eyes and focusing on specific moods and composition. Often with secondary transparent image/s to show movement or specific scenario.
In my paintings, I don’t intend to replicate photo-realistic objects, but to capture the utmost uniqueness of life.
Illustrating my subjects, I often pay no attention to exact shapes, textures, or real colors and emphasize just on a small fragment,
sometimes a very tiny detail, in order to insinuate an idea. That approach leads me to concentrate on what I feel and not what I see or know about the subject. Also, it helps me to effectively use visuals to depict a story about my subject.

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Mary Russell • Oklahoma • waow

Mary Russell lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma where she paints representational art that encompasses multiple genres including figure work, landscape, and still life. She is the recipient of awards from the prestigious Salon International, Women Artists of the West, the Pastel Society of America, and Oil Painters of America, and she has been featured in multiple magazines including American Artist, Southwest Art, and American Art Collector.

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Roberta Barnes • Nebraska • waow

Roberta Barnes, a native of Nebraska, lives with her husband on a ranch next to the Nebraska National Forest. The artist shares her love of the landscape through her works in oils.  She finds an endless source of inspiration in the landscapes, not only in her “roots” from the Columbus area but also in the Sandhills region of Nebraska.  Her work is a part of both public and private collections.

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