M.C. Poulsen was raised on a cattle and outfitting ranch near Cody, Wyoming. His love for the West evolved from working and painting the people he has met and the scenes he has observed through the years. Poulsen's sensitivity in his work not only comes from first hand knowledge of what he is painting, but from his own adversity. He has emerged the winner from a battle with leukemia and has persued his art with a fervor to make up for lost time.

Poulsen exhibited a one man show at the Capitol Rotunda in July of 92 in Washington D.C. and was the first Western artist to exhibit in Russia as a cultural exchange. He is scheduled to show at the Gilcrease Museum in Oklahoma among others.

Poulsen views his art as a continuous development of a God given talent, one that he can share with others. When you view one of Poulsen's paintings there is a depth that goes beyond the human eye.

Mike Poulsen is as heroic as the people and places he paints. His portraits reveal the depth, strength and the struggle of rugged individuals. Their dignity in the face of real hardship mirrors his own. His landscapes reveal a rugged beauty shaped the people who came to terms with it.

Mike paints from the heart. In his life he has experienced hopelessness and joy, determination and success, pain and suffering and hard won dignity. There is a piece of Mike Poulsen, a personal experience, in every one of his paintings.

Mike Poulsen's art is derived from a lifetime of study and experience, of rigor and self-discipline. As a boy he studied art in the East and at he age of 13 his art was given substance and direction when the family moved to Wyoming where Mike learned the outfitting business. Over the next 20 years he experienced the people and places that he would come to know and paint.

The harshness of the west took his fathers life in a hunting accident. His children, conceived through the miracle of invitro fertalization, served as a powerful reminder of the joyous rewards of determination, persistence and purpose. When he was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent a bone marrow transplant he learned, first hand the preciousness of life itself.

Inspiration is what Mike Poulsen life and his art are all about. Revealed in his paintings is a sensitivity, honesty and accuracy born of uncommon experience and a lust for life.