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.
Katy Smith • California • waow
Katy Smith is a plein air landscape artist specializing in paintings of locations on the Central Coast of California. She finds her inspiration directly from the world around her. She enjoys painting locations of historical significance both to capture their beauty and to draw awareness to those places that need to be conserved for future generations. Her subject matter and loose brushwork lean toward California Impressionism/The Eucalyptus School with a subtle sense of romanticism, and the color palette of the Hudson River School. Her work has been described as “ethereal”.
Pat Meyer • Oklahoma • waow
Pat Meyer’s love of art started as a collector. Since retiring from the corporate world, the pursuit of personally creating art has been her passion. Meyer creates oil paintings and floral compositions that celebrate the beauty of flowers, light, color, and nature. Many pieces depict roses, garden scenes, bouquets, and other lush floral imagery. The artist often reflects on personal memories of flowers and the sensory experience of gardens, using vibrant colors and expressive brushwork to bring her floral scenes to life.
Nina Cobb Walker • Texas • waow
Nina Cobb Walker is a progressive, modern Classical Impressionist. She was trained in the tradition of Classical Russian Impressionism. She applies the traditional philosophy and techniques of Impressionism to her own work, but changes the way traditional Impressionism is perceived by re-imagining it and its subject matter in a modern context and sensibility.
Jude Tolar • Oklahoma • waow
Jude Tolar's art is lyrical and representational. She celebrates beauty and joy in the world. She's known mainly for floral and tree portraits outdoors and glass subjects indoors. She prefers to work from life, using mostly Terry Ludwig soft pastels on Art Spectrum ColourFix paper. She began using pastels as a way to study color and work easily en plein air, and immediately loved the results. Tolar has exhibited in galleries, invitational group and solo shows; her work is in collections across the United States and abroad. She also demonstrates her pastel techniques and teaches pastel workshops on various subjects.
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.
Angela Mía • Texas • waow
Exalting the human spirit through expressive faces and natural body movement has become the recognized trademark of Angela Mia’s figurative bronze sculpture. Her work’s greatest inspiration is the ever-changing individuality of her children.
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.
Leslie White • Colorado • waow
Leslie White is an American artist best known for her watercolor paintings that capture the essence of landscapes, places of personal meaning, and travel experiences. Her work often reflects bright, intense colors and dramatic shadows, drawing viewers into the emotion and atmosphere of each scene. She creates the vivid color of her vibrant paintings by layering multiple washes of watercolor.
Deana Goldsmith • Mississippi • waow
Deana Goldsmith is an American pastel artist known for her richly detailed still life and bird pastel drawings that often evoke a sense of nostalgia and connection with nature. She is a self-taught artist. Her carefully composed scenes feature birds, vintage objects, and flora, created with pan pastels, pastel pencils and sticks on sanded pastel paper. She builds many delicate layers to achieve her soft, yet detailed, compositions.
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.
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.
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.
Felicia • Colorado • waow
A nationally noted, award winning sculptress, specializing in miniature to monumental work. Felicia’s portraiture and figurative Southwest manner demonstrate the uniqueness of her elegant, recognizable style. Felicia appeared in publications and books such as Women Leaders of Colorado, Sculpture of the Rockies, and many news and magazine articles. Felicia was recognized as one of the top women leaders in Colorado.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.