Don Ward graduated with honors from Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, California in 1973. He has resided in Taos, New Mexico since 1985. After a career in freelance illustration and outdoor-pictorial advertising in Los Angeles, he decided to pursue the life of a "fine artist." Don is represented in galleries throughout the southwest. He has instructed both portraiture and landscape painting classes for the University of New Mexico, Taos and has done numerous "plein-air" workshops for the Taos Institute of Art, Scottsdale Artists School and the Fredericksberg Artists School, among others. Since 1987 he has also held a weekly figure drawing group that is attended by many local artists.

Besides teaching and painting around the Taos area, Don enjoys going on painting trips in his specially designed mobile painting studio.

"Painting nature from life, for me, is the ultimate experience. It's like the excitement a musician feels when playing "live." Nature is the foil that I can react to and interpret. Painting is a performance of how we see and react to what is around us. Hopefully my work brings to the viewer the visual experience of the moment and is something more than just a picture. And, that after years of "plein-air" painting, I can bring into my studio the same quality of life to my larger pieces."