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.

A wonderful way to spend an afternoon is finding two people that walk into your gallery (or in this case my new Maynard Dixon & Native American Art Museum) who are authorities on Charles Lummis. Christian Rodriguez, who is the curator of the Lummis House (AKA El Alisal), and Kim Walters, who was the archivist for there for decades are both experts on this bigger than life individual. The three of us discuss this man's life and just go back and forth sharing a massive amount of information on a person that was critically important to an artist that I specialize in, Maynard Dixon.

It's really fun because it's just we're all beaming in on what was important or how we saw it. I saw Lummis in a particular light based on my understanding of his and Dixon's relationship. The truth is he was such a complex and nuanced person in many different ways. He's still important to California and to the story of the West as a whole. In fact, he was one of the individuals responsible for the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, which opened in 1907 and was absorbed by the Autry Museum in 2003.

I just found it so fascinating and the conversation went on for two hours. There were things that I came away with going "okay, I didn't know this" or "I definitely want to learn more about this." Now I plan on doing some follow up research because all of these good answers lead to better and better questions.

My question to you is - do you want to just see how individuals who really love what they do interact, talk about their expertise, and contemplate the inner-workings of one singular individual? Well in that case, this is the one for you.

I'm here at the Saguaro Theater in Wickenburg, AZ to give a presentation on my newest novel "Broken Promises: A Westin Blackwood Art Detective Mystery." This event was setup and hosted by my dear friends at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum.

The museum itself is a wonderful place so I hope everyone can come out and visit them. I've been here dozens and dozens times. They have one of the greatest collections of Western and Native American art.

This podcast is partly an art history lesson since I talk about the events that inspired my fictional novel. The aforementioned events are very interesting and are tied not only to where I grew up, but also to the city I call home.

Broken Promises is available on my website in hardcover:
https://www.medicinemangallery.com/products/broken-promises-a-westin-blackwood-art-detective-mystery-by-mark-sublette

**Also available on all eBook platforms.

I had Maeve Eichelberger on today and I really like to call her just "Maeve." I think that's a good way to just brand her name, but maybe you'll hear that on the podcast. I don't remember if I talked about it in the podcast or if it was just in private, but that's the fun thing about podcast is you never know what's going to come out.

Maeve and I talked about the new show she's having with Jordan K. Walker, Josh Gibson, and Whitney Gardner which is the New Young Gun show. It was fun to just kind of catch up with her on what she's doing. We talked about her new studio and some of her relationships with individuals like Barbara Van Cleve and it's always unique to discuss art with individuals that see the world differently. Maeve really does see the world in her own way on so many levels, not only the way she makes her art, but the types of media that she uses as well.

She uses acrylic for her saddles and now she's making clothing based sculptures which are really interesting and something I think will be sought after when people find out what she's doing. I always have a great time talking to Maeve and I'm so happy she was able to take the time to come and do this podcast for our group exhibition, New Young Guns.

Whitney Gardner brought in new paintings for the New Young Guns Group Show, which opens in a few days so we decided to record a podcast at my studio in Tucson. The show features Jordan Walker, Josh Gibson, Maeve Eichelberger, and today's guest, Whitney. Now, she's been on the podcast before, which we filmed in November 2022, the same day I began representing her in my gallery. Two years and 100 episodes later, Whitney sheds light on what she's been up to the last couple of years.

It's really quite interesting to speak to an artist at the beginning of their career, and then again while they are on the rise. You can feel it. It's wild to watch that cascade of interest pool up in smaller circles and eventually overflow into the Western art world at large. That's pretty much what's happened with Whitney since I've known her. She's won all these awards in the last two years and been picked up by another reputable gallery in Santa Fe, McLarry Fine Art. They had a show for her which did well, extremely well actually.

These kinds of things begin adding up and next thing you know you're in museums, articles are being written on you in major magazines, and your art career is no longer a dream but a template for the next up-and-coming artist.

I think all of these artists that make up the New Young Guns will feel that in some form or fashion. That's what you want as an artist. To be recognized by people for your hard work, dedication, and what you have to say. That being said, there are all-new responsibilities and considerations that come with having a shiny new platform like this.

People tend to think "oh, fame is so great," or "wow, selling art is easier than ever." Well sure, it can be, but it also has the other aspects that go along with it. It becomes a duty of sorts to continue and produce work that resonates with people... and if it doesn't, well then you may not be able to pay the bills.

Anyhow, this podcast was so fun. It's been a privilege to get to see Whitney's journey over the last two years. This upcoming show, which is going to be a really terrific will put her skills and the skills of her peers on full display. I genuinely hope you can make it.

I had Barbara Van Cleve on the podcast today and she is just incredible. Barbara spent her entire life as photographer, getting her first camera in 1946 at age 11. She has a photograph that is still being printed and published to this day that she took in 1950 when she was 15 while on a camping trip with her father. We talk about her life and how she managed to go from being a fourth generation rancher to the celebrated photographer she is today.

Her family gets to Montana in 1889, years before Montana was even a state. Her love of the ranch, of horses, of cattle, of being a true Montanan fueled her early days of photography. To many people, Montana is a very special place. She is extremely proud of that heritage and has been the recipient of many, many awards from not only Montana, but from all over the place.

Barbara and her work has been featured on CBS , CNN, and more. There's a documentary that's just finishing just on her life too. She's really important and we're very fortunate to have her in our gallery, thanks to Andrew Smith, who represented her for 40 years.

When Andrew closed his brick and mortar gallery, we were fortunate to be able to open a new door and begin representing her at Medicine Man Gallery. For me, even more importantly, is getting the opportunity to begin a friendship with this person who's a very important artist, both personally and historically.

That's what makes this podcast so much fun. I mean, those are the kind of podcasts that I just devour because it's real and she is so open and spontaneous. Real talk, if you don't like this podcast, you're probably not going to like any of my podcasts.

Anyway, we had a lovely to talk and went for about two hours. So I'm going to make this into a part one and part two. So this is part two of western photography legend Barbara Van Cleve on Art Dealer Diaries Podcast episode 319.