Rachel Brownlee, The Fencing Rig, charcoal, 43 x 29.
Growing up on a ranch in Nebraska’s Sand Hills, Rachel Brownlee always admired the custom working saddle her grandfather had bought secondhand back in the 1940s. “It has so many different types of cracks in the leather that each tell a unique story,” she says. So, when Brownlee set out to create “the largest charcoal drawing by far that I’ve ever done,” she knew just what the subject had to be. The result is her award-winning THE FENCING RIG.
Captured in minute detail, it impresses all the more because its home-schooled, 29-year-old creator has been making art professionally for just the past two years. “I’ve always loved to draw, but art education is not something that’s really appreciated in this down-to-earth ranching community,” Brownlee says. She majored in computer science at the University of Nebraska Omaha, where she launched the software company she still runs, developing MooManager, a program for keeping track of large cattle ranches. She married her high school sweetheart and now uses her successful software to help manage his family’s spread.
Brownlee says she finds working in charcoal “very much like software engineering: It’s right or it’s wrong, and you just have to be really skilled in how you use it.” She keeps her workspace “immaculately clean,” even vacuuming up stray charcoal dust. The results of her painstaking efforts are richly sumptuous drawings of timeless appeal. No wonder Brownlee’s art history hero is Leonardo da Vinci. She says, “I always thought he exemplified everything I would like to be—someone both technically minded and artistic at the same time.”
Find Brownlee’s work at www.rachelbrownlee.com.
This story appeared in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.