JOEL OSTLIND ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Before becoming an artist, Joel Ostlind was a working cowboy, so it seems to reason that his subject matter revolves around cowboys, horses and cattle, wildlife and the beautiful outdoors. Born and raised in Casper, Wyoming, he attended Casper College and took classes in watercolor and basic design before earning degrees in soil science and ranch management. As a single young man, he left Wyoming to cowboy. He worked full time on big ranches, using his education in ranching. Joel recalls one Christmas, while working on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle, his parents sent him a box, “it contained a wool sweater, a tiny Christmas tree with electric lights and a brand-new sketch book.” From that day forward, he set a goal to complete at least a page of sketches a day. “That first sketchbook wound up full of drawings of things that had happened during those days. I knew that I had a long way to go with the art, but I kept at it,” he said. Ostlind recalls an incident that was instrumental in his pursuing art. In the 1980’s he was living in a cow camp in Montana where the advertising firm, Leo Burnett, liked to photograph Marlboro advertisements. The bunkhouse was the gathering place for all of the Marlboro cowboys and advertising firm crew. He showed some of his watercolors to the art director and a photographer. “They were professionals and said that I had something going. That was the nudge that got me rolling,” Ostlind recalls. When his children
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