Dennis Ziemienski | Tales of the Southwest

By Norman Kolpas

In Alta California, a proud, red-jacketed ranchero serenely surveys the rolling hills of his land from the back of a steed whose bridle is adorned with silver conchos. A young cowboy, holding the reins of his galloping horse with one hand, wildly waves his hat in the other while racing a steam locomotive across the desert chaparral. Against the backdrop of a palm- and umbrella-shaded 1950s Southwest desert oasis, a bathing beauty soars midair in her descent to an unseen swimming pool.

These types of images in the vibrantly realistic figurative paintings by Dennis Ziemienski engage the imagination through the scenes they portray. At a glance, they give rise to an urge to complete the narrative at which the scene itself intriguingly hints. And the artist himself charmingly demurs from suggesting the entirety of the tales that might be revealed through his oil on canvas brushstrokes. “I learned early on that you’re not telling a story,” he says of a key takeaway from his education for the wide-ranging illustration career that preceded his equally successful years as a fine artist. “You’re showing it. And then it’s up to viewers to tell the story themselves.”

Ziemienski has been inspiring viewers’ imaginations through his artistic talents since his early days growing up in the town of Vallejo located on the northeastern edge of San Francisco Bay. “I thought it was magic to be able to take a pencil or a crayon and draw something to look like it was supposed to,” he says. “In kindergarten, I was the class entertainer, so to speak. The teacher would say, ‘Dennis, come on up and draw your cartoon characters.’ And I would draw Mickey, Donald, Goofy and Bugs Bunny quite well.” During elementary school, his artwork won contests on the Bay Area kids’ TV shows Captain Fortune and Captain Satellite. In high school, he says, “I did all the posters for everyone running for class president or cheerleader, or for the prom or whatnot. When I figured we needed an art club, I started one and was its president.”

After a couple of semesters at San Jose State College and a stint as a U.S. Navy submariner during the Vietnam War, Ziemienski enrolled at the esteemed California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, graduating in 1972 with a bachelor’s in fine art. “That’s where I learned not to tell a story but to show a story,” he says. Even before graduating, he began getting professional illustration assignments and, degree in hand, he lived in Palo Alto and took the commuter train into San Francisco, where there was a wealth of freelance work with ad agencies and publishers. He even got an assignment from a then little-known tech startup called Apple. Around 1980, he moved to New York, where during six years there his reputation and demand for his work grew as he illustrated book jackets for top authors like Elmore Leonard and Ken Follett and grew a long roster of major clients including The New York Times, Macy’s, United Airlines, Sports Illustrated and National Geographic.

Along the way, Ziemienski developed a signature style that centered on the human figure, drawing on lessons learned through his studies of artists from the Golden Age of Illustration. Among those artists were German-born American illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, who painted 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post as well as classic ads for such clients as Gillette Safety Razors, Ivory Soap, and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes; and Welsh-born muralist, artist and illustrator Frank Brangwyn, who created some of Great Britain’s most memorable and moving posters during World War I. “I realized that the strongest compositions I could come up with would be to take a figure, or an object, and make that the centerpiece to everything else around it,” says Ziemienski. “It’s eye-popping. Even if it’s on a billboard you’re driving past at 60 miles-per-hour, you won’t forget it.”

In 1986, after settling back home in Northern California, where he and his wife, mosaic artist Anne Ziemienski, now live in the Wine Country town of Glen Ellen, he soon found himself speeding toward a new career in fine art. One logistical factor in that change was the advertising world’s shift to digital art, anathema to an artist who worked in finely painted images, not high-res jpgs. Even more importantly, around the mid-1990s he found himself fielding more and more requests from collectors along the lines of, “Do you have the artwork you did for that book cover? I’d like to buy it.”

That eventually led him to advertise his paintings of Western and Southwestern subjects in Southwest Art magazine, which began attracting the attention of top galleries. “In 2001, Mark Sublette at Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson called and told me, ‘We’ve been seeing your art. Why don’t you bring some down. I put about 15 pieces in front of him and said, ‘Go ahead, select the ones you want.’ He said, ‘No, I want them all.’ And then he sold them all!”

While he still takes on such plum illustration assignments as the official poster for the 2006 running of the Kentucky Derby, Ziemienski happily works full time as a fine artist. That work has come to focus more and more on the American West and, to some significant extent, on his own home state of California, “my first love.” He sees those two regions as rarely mutually exclusive. “If you’re in California, you can travel in any direction and find your reference for the entirety of the world,” he says. And certainly, that extends to classic Western scenes and subjects, which abound in the state. “There’s so much Western history out here—the missions, the Pony Express, the Gold Rush, the Transcontinental Railroad, the lumber industry, old Hollywood,” he enthuses.

In fact, Ziemienski’s reputation as a fine artist who celebrates the region—along with other places far and wide, of course—secured him an invitation to participate for the first time this year in the Masters of the American West at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles beginning February 10. In it, he’ll showcase four new works, including THE ARRIVAL OF THE BOSTON TRADER, a scene of a Californio horseman waving his sombrero at a tall ship sailing just off the coast, and BENEATH THE SAN GABRIELS, which portrays mission-era ranching life in the San Gabriel Valley, now home to the city of Pasadena and barely 13 miles due east of the Autry.

Yet another California-set painting in the show, destined for the popular miniatures sale, may mark for some viewers a slightly less familiar aspect of Ziemienski’s work. The 9-by-16-inch EL CAMINO REAL shows a humble oxcart, driven by a tiny figure in a white shirt, rounding a bend in a rutted dirt trail below soft gray-green hills, “gently undulating pieces of earth.” Travelers still see that landscape to this day when driving in the center of the state along U.S. 101—a freeway that follows part of the route established between the late-17th and mid-19th centuries as El Camino Real, “The King’s Highway,” connecting the chain of 21 Spanish missions established along the length of the state.

Unlike the sharply delineated images in so much of his work, however, this small painting, its loose brushstrokes clearly visible, possesses a softly impressionist quality that enhances an aura of long-ago romance. “I guess the looseness comes from the fact that, working at this small size, the brush isn’t exactly as tiny as I’d like it to be,” Ziemienski explains. “So, it is more impressionistic. But the painting still has that same basic element that I like to include in my larger works. The road is the centerpiece here, and everything else is subordinate. Composition is the most important thing. It counts more than the technique.”

He goes on to cite a lesson he learned years ago by studying the works of the great Southwestern artist Maynard Dixon, explaining, “I learned from him that when you put figures, or even a horse or a coyote, they help you show the scale of the scene you’re painting.” And by doing so, they also serve as surrogates for the viewer of the artwork, drawing them in, fully engaging them. “That’s basically how it works for me,” Ziemienski concludes. “I’ll show you a story. You tell it.”

contact informationziemienski.com

representationMedicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ, medicinemangallery.comAltamira Fine Art, Jackson, WY & Scottsdale, AZ, altamirafineart.comBlue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, NM & Durango, CO, blueraingallery.comFoR Fine Art, Whitefish & Bigfork, MT, forfineart.com

upcoming showsMasters of the American West, Autry Museum of the American West, February 10-March 24.Altamira Fine Art, Scottsdale, April 9-20; Jackson, July 1-14.Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, July 26-August 10.Medicine Man Gallery, November 2024.

This story appeared in the February/March 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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