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.