Wes Waugh is a Boone, North Carolina artist, workshop instructor and presenter. He first began painting at the age of 12 and is currently noted as one of the southeast regions leading landscape watercolorists. Waugh describes his influences as stemming from the translational and design influenced watercolor landscapes of the late Eliot O’Hara and Edgar Whitney, both prominent mid-20th century American watercolor masters. Wes's own workshops combine an intensive focus on the principles of design combined with a unique approach to building subject relationships. This is all carried out with humor and fun to lighten the learning process.
Wes has studied with contemporary watercolorists William B. (Skip) Lawrence and Cheng Khee-Chee, both students of Edgar Whitney. He has also studied locally with watercolorist Joe Miller and renowned painter/printmaker Noyes Capehart. Wes’s work is typically dominated by bold color washes and the use of a variety of techniques and surfaces chosen to best reflect the nature of his subjects. His body of work now includes forays into digital media as well as painting and he is a co-founder of Bear Trail Studio Partners, a fine art reproduction and art products company that serves the home decor industry. Wes works as a product consultant and workshop instructor for Cheap Joes Art Supplies, Inc., in Boone, N.C., and is currently in his 24th year as a full-time program director within the Learning Assistance Program at Appalachian State University.
Being a lifelong outdoor enthusiast greatly contributes to his subject choices as images collected over years of backpacking, canoeing and fishing excursions often form the base from which new paintings evolve. Wes has noted inspiration from travels to Maine, Canada, Montana and India as well as from a background in zoology and a fondness for the naturalist artists of earlier eras. Mostly, however, he views his work as that of a regionalist landscape painter of the western North Carolina mountains and sees no end to the possibilities to be expressed in this vein. Wes held his 9th solo exhibition, Evergreen, at Blowing Rock Frameworks & Gallery in October of 2007 and exhibited 25 works of both watercolor and digital imaging entitled China: Images from the People's Republic in October of 2008. No exhibitions are scheduled for 2009, but 2010 holds possibilities. contact info