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It's not surprising that Denver artist Kent Lemon makes a living doing what he loves - painting fine art, illustrating for magazines, and capturing hunting and fishing excursions on canvas.
The writing was on the wall in the early 1980s when, as an art student at New York City's Parsons School of Design, Lemon would espouse the Nobelwinning economic theories of monetarist Milton Friedman while others in the East Village talked existentialist Soren Kirkegaard.
"We'd wear Ronald Reagan buttons and were right-wingers right there in the belly of the avant-garde leftwingers," recalled Lemon of days spent with his roommate Gene Fama, whose father Eugene was a University of Chicago economist with Friedman. "And when the teachers would say, `You can't make a living doing art,' I would say, `You may as well close the school down. What are we doing here if you can't make a living at art?' "
Lemon,...