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.

Barbara Meikle • New Mexico • waow

Barbara Meikle is an artist who paints the simple world outside of her door in Tesuque, New Mexico. Meikle has been an artist from childhood, sketching the horses she loved and took care of in order to ride. After earning a BA in painting and printmaking at the University of Denver and studying watercolor at Cambridge University in England, she returned to New Mexico in 1990 to pursue her dream of owning a gallery. Barbara Meikle’s bright and vibrant work includes horses elegantly in motion or the expression of whimsical donkey or the dynamic beauty of the Western landscape.  Barbara’s artistic success has allowed her to give back to the animal community she loves by donating to equine rescues and animal shelters throughout the Southwest, including Equine Spirit Sanctuary in Taos and the New Mexico Wildlife Center in Española. 

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Lynn Attig • California • waow

Painting the Still Wild West...

Lynn is an award-winning Western artist who enjoys capturing the beauty and traditions of California ranch life. She is co-founder, president emerita, and director of communications for the Pastel Society of Southern California; vice-president, exhibition chair and Signature member of the Pastel Society of the West Coast; juried member of the Pastel Society of America; and a member of the California Art Club and Pacific Arts Group. Lynn is also the founder and past director of the Rejoice in Art! Fine Art Fair & Exhibition (2015-2019) held in Redondo Beach, California. As a four-year invited artist to the Tehachapi Arts Exhibition and Sale (2022-2025), Lynn's work has been featured in Western Art Collector and American Art Collector magazines. Her paintings have been acquired by many collectors over the past two decades.

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Kristy McNelly • Texas • waow

Born on a farm in Fremont, Michigan, Kristy McNelly’s early days were spent riding horses and playing in the woods along the creek. Art has been a long pastime since childhood. It is that love for nature and animals that is still carried into her work today as an oil painting artist. An active volunteer and director of the AgriCultural Museum and Arts Center in Boerne, Texas. Since 2002, Kristy has been enjoying putting on events and antique tractor pulls. Kristy can also be seen on back roads around Texas driving her Seafoam Green antique 1950 Ford Truck called “Seabiscuit”.

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E.L. Stewart • Washington • waow

The artist was born in a large stone mansion in Michigan, situated between Chicago and Detroit, and grew up in the Midwest surrounded by creativity from an early age. Her father painted, while her mother danced—fueled by strong coffee and a love of chocolate. Art was not a discovery later in life; it was woven into her beginnings.

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Sandra J. Schultz• Wisconsin • waow

From finding solitary sanctuary in the northern Wisconsin woods around Sandra’s childhood farm, to a career as a wildlife biologist, the natural progression after retirement has been to share the immense beauty and wonder of the natural world that she has experienced. “My hope is that others may come to understand it more deeply and be moved to protect it long after I am gone. In many ways, my art is a way of giving back—or perhaps giving forward—for all the gifts of seeing that I have been given.”

Explore a collection of wildlife paintings that reflect a lifelong connection to the natural world. Sandra creates art that honors the beauty, spirit, and individuality of wild animals. Each piece is a tribute to my deep reverence for wildlife and a commitment to artistic excellence.

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Nori Thorne • Arizona • waow

Nori Thorne is an award–winning pastelist celebrated for her depictions of the people, artifacts, lifestyle and the land of the American Southwest.  She works to capture a strong sense of place and secrets revealed through the mastery of her medium — capturing changing light and color with formidable drawing skill.  She is undaunted by the challenges of working en plein air to render her desert scenes.  Cayoneering, which always calls for endurance while packing in her pastels and panels, is just part of the joy of making art about this rugged region.   She is equally at home with revealing the unique beauty of the lifestyle and peoples of the American Southwest with sensitive feel and authenticity.

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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”.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.   

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Pastels, Birds, Still Life WAOW . Pastels, Birds, Still Life WAOW .

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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