About Zach Even

Long before Zach Even grasped a paintbrush, he was catching trout with a kiddie pole and tagging along with family on camping trips or to elk camp in Wyoming’s high country.

Zach’s passion for nature, where the extraordinary is ordinary, developed in childhood
growing up in Green River, Wyo. In spacious and uncrowded Wyoming, where pronghorns outnumber people, Zach learned to tie flies to entice trout in pristine streams, hike and climb mountains, hunt pronghorn, deer and elk with a bow or modern firearm, and enjoy a hearty meal with good friends over a campfire. As a teen, he tucked notepads into his pack on these excursions to sketch what he saw, satisfying a desire to connect with a natural world we often are disconnected from. So it was natural for Zach to transform these snapshots to canvas.

Art, the outdoors and athletics were the focal point of Zach’s teen and college years. When he wasn’t painting, fly fishing or climbing mountains, he excelled at track and field. He was a Wyoming state discus champion, and was talented enough to earn a scholarship to Chadron State College in Nebraska. There, he set a school record in the hammer throw and later competed in the NAIA national championships. And his skill as an artist grew while in school, where he would graduate with a bachelors of art with emphasis in 2D and 3D art as well as graphic design.

Zach’s zeal for the outdoors and his athletic skills drew him to mountaineering. He climbed Gannett Peak in Wyoming as a youngster, and later added a handful of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks to his list. He’s also climbed Mount Rainier in Washington and reached the summit of Denali / Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America.

His talent landed him a job as a graphic designer for the outdoor retailer Cabela’s, where his paintings and sketches of moose, elk and trout attracted the attention of company executives when they were looking for artwork to adorn catalog covers. Zach’s eye-catching painting of a trout filling up on nymphs earned him the coveted cover of the annual fly fishing catalog. And his rendition of a pronghorn buck was selected by Nebraska’s Game and Fish
Commission for use on the Nebraska Habitat Stamp one fall. His artwork was improving, but Zach continually pushed himself to refine his skill.

It is important to Zach to make his work different from the standard wildlife art. His work holds the viewer’s eye because of its unique perspective, emotion, clarity, color, detail and even humor. His paintings and sketches truly capture a moment in time: A pronghorn buck resting, its eyes alert; a fat rainbow trout flapping its gills while cradled in an angler’s hands, a crouching rooster pheasant, ready to flush from cover; or a bull elk bugling in fall, its nostrils flaring and head tilted backward. His work has an authenticity about it that can’t be matched by those who simply don’t spend time in the field.

A job opportunity brought Zach his wife Anne, his college sweetheart, back to Wyoming. There, he divides his free time between his art, the outdoors, and spending time with his wife and two young children. Zach looks forward to passing along his love for the outdoors and art to his children.

-Kevin McCullen