I had Rachel Brownlee on today and she has such an interesting story. You have this individual who had never identified herself as an artist until several years ago, and now she's and award-winning artist.

Growing up, she was homeschooled with her seven siblings, living life as a fifth generation Nebraskan rancher (she still is actually). But she finds her voice as an artist and just kind of had this insane, meteoric rise from 2021 until now where she wins the best of show award from the Mountain Oyster Club and starts getting invited to all of these different shows and being represented by important galleries across the West.

Fast forward to today and Rachel is this kind of phenomenon in the art world, working with charcoal like nobody has before. A person who had no training in art other than her own ambition to learn and to create like crazy.

This is a great story. I mean, it's shows that if you're committed to what you want to do in life, you can absolutely do it with enough hard work. She has two kids, she's married to a rancher and still works the ranch to some extent, but really is now a full-time artist, spending eight plus hours a day drawing in the studio.

We go through this whole story of how she got where she is now and what she's currently working on. I myself am very excited that Rachel is going to be a part of my Masters of Drawing Group Exhibition in February 2025.

So there you have it. Really interesting story. I hope you like it. I had a great time talking to Rachel Brownlee on episode 325 of the Art Dealer Diaries Podcast.

This is a really interesting and fun lecture that I did along with Dennis Ziemienski. It's to celebrate his 50th anniversary of being an artist, and we're having a retrospective at our gallery for those who might be listening to this sometime in the future (this was in December of 2024).

I talked about Maynard Dixon and his illustrations and Dennis speaks on his own illustration career. It turns out there is a lot of very interesting parallels. For instance, they both went to New York at 33, hey both started doing fine art at about 45, 50, and when they first started their commercial art careers, there were serious economic events happening. For Dixon, it was the bank panic of 1907. For Ziemienski, it was the 1980, 81, bank crisis where we had the worst recession since the Great Depression with 11% unemployment.

So those correlations come from my part of the lecture and then Dennis talks about his life as a commercial artist and all the illustrations that he did for things like the Olympics, Academy Awards, Kentucky Derby, Super Bowl and those types of things.

I hope you watch this on YouTube, because I think that is really the way to get the flavor of this podcast. Also, thank you to the Western Art Patrons (WAP) for being such a great crowd.