Dane Ellsworth 

   Dane Ellsworth enjoys all things Texan. Whether it's an old west character or a depression era car his painting backdrop is the Lone Star State. He has been wielding a crayon, pencil or brush as far back as he can remember. In his junior year, due to a long list of dubious events, Dane wound up on the verge of homelessness. Between a longsuffering landlord and a horse rancher who took him under his wing he was able to finish high school. Once he graduated, he moved to the ranch and started working with horses and developed a love for that majestic animal. It was about this time he met and became friends with Fred Olds who was the director of the Oklahoma Territorial Museum in Guthrie Oklahoma. Mr. Olds encouraged him to become a painter and also to study the works of the great masters. Dane soon headed east and spent a year and countless hours hanging out in the museums of New York, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. The day came when he decided he had a head full of knowledge and that he should see if it would amount to anything. He signed a 6-month lease on an old house in Denison Texas and shut himself in and just painted pictures. About the middle of the fifth month, he awoke in the night to find the neighborhood on fire and fast approaching. “The only thing I could think of was to save my easel, paints, and brushes, and the rest be damned! Frantically, I drug it all out into the front yard just in time for the fire department to save the house by wetting it down, front yard included. My painting of Teddy Roosevelt was in ruination. I decided somebody upstairs was trying to tell me not to take myself too seriously. I wasn't ready to paint full time.” Ellsworth then hired on with a harvester for a couple of years working the wheat and durham fields from Texas to Canada. A camera and a sketch pad were always close at hand but so was his desire to put some paint on canvas. Before the season was completed his second year a snowstorm blew into North Dakota ending the harvest.  “In my own words, I told that bunch of combiners that as soon as this weather breaks YOU'AL MAY GO TO HELL, I'M GOING TO TEXAS! No offense to anyone, but from an early age I'd been to enough places to know that the land and the people of Texas just seemed to be the closest to my soul. I vowed that no matter what else I might be doing in life I needed to always have an easel close at hand and do it in Texas.” He went on to establish a successful construction business and stayed true his vow by keeping a gallery stocked and painting enough for a show or two per year.  He has done historical illustration and is a member of the Outdoor Painters Society. He continues to be a backroads traveler and a student of frontier history. His works are in many public and private collections. He has matured into being a fulltime painter and lives with his wife in the beautiful hills outside of Fredericksburg Texas.