Pat Wiles is a horse woman and grandmother, as well as a nationally known, professional transparent watercolor and Plein Aire artist. She has taught watercolor painting for nearly 50 years. Her paintings have appeared in galleries, museum exhibitions, and juried art festivals throughout the United States. These include the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe exhibition of women representational artists at the National Arts Club in New York, The Museum of the Great Plains in Oklahoma, and Les Etoiles at the Musee de Arte Helof in Paris France. Her work is represented in the Artists’ Gallery in Canon City, Colorado and the Blue Spruce Gallery in Florence, Colorado. She served on the board of the Canon City Public Arts Committees, the Fremont Center for the Arts, and is a member of the Florence Arts Council.

Her philosophy is that you cannot paint a horse properly if you have never brushed one: which is to say the more you experience the better you paint. That is why her range of experience has stemmed from living on an Indian reservation, riding wild bulls in Mexico, white water canoeing, the lower canyons of the Rio Grande, backpacking through Europe, to raising a pack of wolves on a ranch in Colorado, white water kayaking, zip lining with much in between. She was the advertising artist for a number of horse magazines including the Florida Horse, Arena, News, Horse Takes and the Quarter Racing Record. She illustrated many Texas Parks and Wildlife and General Land office Publications and painted illustrations for the Geologic Guidebook to the Gold Belt Byway for the Florissant Fossil beds. She created the Guffey, Colorado Centennial, postal cancellation stamp, as well as logos for historic downtown Canon City, and Florence Colorado. She painted “Cat Ballou” a permanent movie mural in the Fremont Center for the arts. She has illustrated dozens of children’s books including the Cowgirl Peg series.