MOSES LAKE - Moses Lake resident John Willey painted for most of his life, but what was once a hobby is now a professional ambition.

Willey started oil painting in his 20s. He is self-taught, and years of dabbling gave him the skill to create paintings managing to capture timeless moments of natural beauty.

While Willey grew up in Washington, he's spent the past 24 years in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Willey moved to Moses Lake in July 2010 to help take care of his father. He's been in Moses Lake ever since, working on his art in his spare time.

Willey's oil and acrylic paintings were recently showcased at a First Friday art show at Red Door Consignment, where he sold many of his paintings and even gave away a painting of a forest scene.

"He gave away the one everyone wanted to buy," Red Door Consignment owner Jan Thacker said with a laugh.

Many of Willey's paintings portray wildlife. Tigers, polar bears, elk, wolves, buffalo and seals are just a few of the animals he's painted. Serene forests and streams, remote buildings, and wide canyons populate his paintings.

"I'm not a city person," he said. "I like getting out in the country. Anything that takes me to the country, I like."

Even so, he's started to branch out, painting landscapes and people more often.

He recently painted the largest painting he's ever done and gave it to his father. The inspiration for it came to him while driving on Wheeler Road en route to Ritzville.

"There's an old barn down there on the way to Ritzville, about 20 miles on the right-hand side," said Willey. "As soon as I drove by that, I knew that I wanted to paint that barn so I took my digital camera down and took a bunch of pictures. I wanted to do a 1920s farm scene with a family."

Willey incorporated a team of horses and a horse-drawn mowing machine into the painting, based on photographs from a Ritzville museum.

"I want to do more of that kind of thing," said Willey. "I'd like to do some more paintings with people in them."

Willey thought it would be more difficult to paint humans than animals, but after painting a portrait of a Native American woman, he was pleasantly surprised.

"I thought, you know what, this isn't that hard after all," he said. "I can do this."

Willey considers himself a realist more than impressionist, but doesn't want his work to be so realistic that it's photographic.

"I'd go get a camera if I wanted to do that," he said. "I respect realist painters that are photographic. That's a lot of talent. But I really don't want to do that. I want art to have the look of art to it, not like somebody took a camera out and took a photograph."

Willey's artwork isn't limited to painting. He also does pencil work and his drawing of a Native American woman with her child won best drawing at this year's Grant County Fair, he said.

"The pencil work ... has, in my opinion, a real attractive quality to it," he said. "You're just dealing with black and white but you can create a really attractive piece of artwork just using black and white, even pen and ink ... I had people come up to the artwork at the art show and say that was their favorite piece, so it doesn't have to be a big splashy painting. If a piece of artwork is done well, it can be good."

Most of Willey's inspiration comes from photographs he sees in books, or in magazines such as National Geographic.

Unlike photography, Willey is able to mix and match elements of different photographs to maximize the aesthetic appeal of his artwork.

He points to a painting of a group of seals, which he based off several different photographs of seals.

"That's one good thing about artwork," he says. "You can take anything from anywhere you want and put it with anything else."

Willey uses oil paints for most of his artwork, he said. While he does do some acrylic paintings, acrylic paints dry faster than oil paints and makes it more difficult to keep colors consistent in a single painting, he said.

To contact Willey about his artwork, email him at willeyr@hotmail.com.