Wayne was born in Northeastern Colorado. He developed a love of art, and especially watercolor, at an early age, and took all the art classes offered throughout high school. During his senior year, he convinced his art teacher, an excellent watercolorist, to provide him another year of art in the media he had fallen in love with, watercolor. As college loomed, Wayne was torn between academics and art. The academic route won out and he pursued a degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Colorado (CU) and later in medicine, also at CU. Becoming a Family Physician, he then practiced in Moscow, Idaho for 30 years before moving to Neskowin, Oregon. As a busy physician, time for art was scant, but he managed to continue his passion in watercolor as well as expanding into photography and stained glass, learned from a dear friend. Since retirement in 2019, he has been able to pursue his lifelong enthusiasm fulltime, varying between all three mediums.
Being a native Coloradoan, and living in Idaho most of his adult life, Wayne fell in love with mountains and nature. He loves to bring nature alive in his watercolors, particularly his love of aspen and birch groves. His love of, and appreciation for the ocean and its surrounding majesty, was born during a two-year sabbatical spent on the Coromandel Coast in New Zealand, and his retirement to the small Oregon coastal town of Neskowin, where he walks the beach daily, camera in hand.
Wayne is an intuitive painter and describes his process as one of spontaneity. “I seem to feel my subject matter at a deep level, and then I just let it flow to my brush,” he described. “Painting is most fun for me when I sit before an empty page and start applying color. Then, I just go where the paint, and my inner sense of a scene, takes me.
Becoming a member of the Pacific Artist Co-op fulfills a lifelong dream of getting to share his creations with art lovers and fellow artists in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Becoming a member of the Pacific Artist Co-op fulfills a lifelong dream of getting to share his creations with art lovers and fellow artists in one of the most beautiful places in the world.