[3] The movement's early participants, and its defining artists, have become known as "the big four": Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey.

These artists combined natural elements of the Puget Sound area with traditional Asian aesthetics to create a novel and distinct regional style, particularly in painting and sculpture, with some drawing, printmaking and photography.

[4] Over time, the influence of the natural setting of Western Washington, especially the flat lands, meandering river channels, and wide open skies of the Skagit Valley, became a unifying aspect of their art.

Guy Anderson, whose main medium was oil painting, also made works from bronze and had "collages" around his home of found objects from beach walks and deteriorating metal which he saw beauty in.

The style of the Northwest School is characterized by the use of symbols of the nature of Western Washington, as well as the diffuse lighting characteristic of the Skagit Valley area.

Dealers such as Zoe Dusanne, Gordon Woodside and John Braseth of the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, as well as museum professionals grouped the four artists together, as did journalists.

He left numerous moody, misty, "northwesty" paintings-some of them titled with admiring reference to Anderson, Tobey, Graves, and Helmi Juvonen.