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.