From Medical Student to Wildlife Artist: Valerie Gobeil’s Unlikely Journey
There are a few key moments that led to wildlife oil painter Valerie Gobeil’s promising career. One of them left her with neck and back injuries and a concussion after a distracted driver T-boned her car.
The collision occurred 13 years ago, during Gobeil’s first year of medical school in Arizona, forcing her to take some time off. “I would read one paragraph, and I’d have to re-read it five, six, seven times to try to retain some of it,” she says. “When I was studying basically the equivalent of a full textbook of material per week, that was just not feasible.”
Gobeil used some of that down-time to continue the hobby of oil painting that she’d taken up after her mother-in-law introduced her to it eight years earlier, and she took courses at Scottsdale Artists’ School. A native of Canada, she had earned a degree in education from the University of Alberta and an archaeology degree from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She also had experience teaching English and French in Japan and working for NATO in Germany. Her plan was to go on and finish medical school, but after dealing with the aftermath of the car accident, she had to decide if she could continue on that path.
Read the full article in the November/December 2026 issue.
Wings of America
oil
30″ by 30″
When Legends Are Made
oil
48″ by 48″
