Who says that "wildlife art" is bland and passé?  Easterners living within the sphere of greater New York and who appreciate the masterly contemporary irreverence of Walton Ford and Alexis Rockman should find the eccentricities of Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen, a madcap Utahan, to be much to their liking.

The traveling exhibition, "Biodiversity in the Art of Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen" is now on display, through the end of March at the Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum in Oradel, New Jersey—part of an enticing line-up of art events the Blauvelt has in store, says James Bellis, the museum's board chaiman.

"We're excited to have this prestigious exhibit at the Blauvelt. Brest van Kempen's work is known throughout the world and he brings a peculiar interpretation of nature," Bellis says. "This is truly an art event not to miss if you love wildlife, whether you make your home in the city or enjoy trekking in the wilderness." (Click on the artist's work, below, to make it bigger).

The Blauvelt Museum is hosting a special reception for van Kempen on Sunday, March 4, 2012 from 2 to 4 pm.



David J. Wagner, curator of the exhibition, says of Brest van Kempen: "Since wildlife is central to the imagery of what he paints, Brest van Kempen is generally thought of as a "wildlife artist." But this is not how I think of him, nor how I think he should be remembered. I think of him as a wildlife artist with imagination. In the world of wildlife art, this is no small distinction. Because most wildlife artists aspire to faithfully render nature into art, they suffer from a corollary that is equally false: in order to render nature into art, they believe a painter must paint every minute detail to perfection. For many wildlife artists today, this is pursued through heavy reliance on reference photography. While it is impossible, as the noted aesthetician E.H.  Gombrich once said, "to render nature into art", it is possible to construct a relational model through whatever style an artist chooses. Like many of his colleagues, Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen chooses to paint in a detailed, representational style, but that's where the similarity ends."

Who is Brest van Kempen? In the unassuming Great Basin town of Springville, Utah, Vern Swanson reigns as a noted authority on two areas of scholarship that might at first appear non inter-related:  modern Russian Impressionism and the religious canon of the Jesus Christ Church of Latter Day Saints, better known as Mormonism.

Swanson is director and curator at the Springville Art Museum, a hidden gem of a fine art institution located south of Salt Lake City along Interstate 15. It is, in fact, the oldest fine art museum in Utah and its Spanish Colonial Revival-style edifice is intended—in the words of LDS Apostle David O. McKay who dedicated it long ago— to be “a sanctuary of beauty and a temple of meditation."

Indeed, besides possessing a substantial collection of works by Russian Impressionists, galleries here feature a range of paintings and sculpture by prominent Utah artists including Maynard Dixon and Springville denizens Cyrus Dallin and John Hafen. Joining them is the work of Brest van Kempen.  A 21st century naturalist, he is described by Swanson as an iincurable free thinker who wears his locks and scruffy beard long as one could easily imagine a younger, pre-occupied Albert Einstein doing.

Brest van Kempen also happens to be one of Swanson’s favorite living artistic provocateurs who makes his home in Holladay near the toes of the Wasatch Mountains.  Swanson’s fondness is revealed when the curator chuckles and tries to explain the artist’s peculiar perspective that is by no means conventional.

“I wouldn’t call him a wildlife artist, strictly speaking,” he says.  “Carel [pronounced like the name Carl] is a painter of fantasy and science fiction, but in the way he presents things, in dichotomies of species and in juxtaposing the habitats of humans and animals, he brings us closer to seeing the truth.  Kind of like author Gabriel García Márquez accomplishes in his works of magical realism.”

This, Swanson ventures confidently, is the foremost purpose of art.  Brest van Kempen is an American original and the more that one meditates on his work, the more one comes to understand the wonders of nature.

Similar praise has been extended to a handful of Brest van Kempen’s contemporaries, names that include New Yorkers Ford and Rockman (whose work was featured recently  at the Smithsonian), Annie Coe, Monty Dolack, Ray Troll, Parks Reece and others.

More than 40 Brest van Kempens, including a number of new works, are on display at the Blauvelt Museum. including the panoramic "Greater Roadrunners & Canyon Towhee" (above).

Depending upon which side of the claw, fang, and predator-prey axis that a species finds itself, Brest van Kempen is guaranteed to jostle the sensibilities. Just as an outsider might, at first blush, conclude incorrectly that there is little intellectual continuity between Russian Impressionism and Mormon scholarship, it is a similar folly to assume that a painter like Brest van Kempen can’t, on the same canvas, connect differing dots.

His acrylic on illustration board adventures stitch Cartesian rules of scientific order together with quantum physics, chaos theory, modern conservation biology and extinction, Darwinian theories of evolution, the comedy found in Gary Larson cartoons, and the possibility that a deep sense of spirituality resides in the absence of a single supreme being.

The virtual cover of Wildlife Art Journal in autumn 2010 featured Brest van Kempen’s massive painting of migrating lesser pink flamingos, part of his “gallery of ceilings” series.  The 72 x 96-inch work is a marvel that has the sensation of being a voyeur at the end of a jet airplane runway.  It's not such a big leap to replace flamingoes with pterodactyls and yes, this artist has ruminated on the thought. 
 
Brest van Kempen is a wild man, not in his personality but in the way he eschews being held captive to predictability.  Tales abound about the extent he will go for hands-on research to what used to be called The Third World.  One of the episodes closer to home goes like this: Painter Cole Johnson says that he and Brest Van Kempen were paddling down the Myakka River wending through the western fringes of the Florida Everglades.

On that outing into America’s largest freshwater marsh—the U.S. equivalent of Botswana’s Okavango Delta—Brest Van Kempen, an adamant admirer of herpetofauna—was hoping for a close visual encounter with the largest local member in that class of animal: the American alligator.

“It was the middle of day and we were gliding along on a calm current and as we got deeper into this sea of grass and water, there would be these huge alligators, I mean 10, 12 footers, maybe bigger, basking on shore and then belly slipping into the water at our approach,” Johnson remembers.  “After awhile, we came upon this nest…and…”

The men spied a mound where, among crumpled shards of eggshells, was a bevy of young alligators hanging close to their birthplace.  They scrambled into the aqua murk while, without missing a beat, Brest Van Kempen leaped out of the boat into the water. He caught one of the scaly youngsters and delightfully inspected it.

“Carel,” Johnson said.  “Are you sure you should be doing this?”

Brest Van Kempen studied the reptile’s features.

“Carel?”

Brest van Kempen remained deep in thought.  It was only when the snout and elongated body, likely that of the infant’s mother, rose to the surface and eyeballed Brest van Kempen that the painter-naturalist repaired, in haste, back over the gunwale of the canoe.



A master of painting “predicament scenes” where the outcome of encounters between subjects is left for the viewer to decide, Johnson said it never occurred to Brest van Kempen that he would create one for himself.

Undeterred, they continued deeper into the marsh.  Losing track of time, they found themselves having to retrace their course home in pitched darkness. Earlier, Brest van Kempen had reasoned to Johnson that gators are less active during the day. His assessment changed at nightfall.

The canoeists could barely see in front of them, the hull of their boat sometimes pounding off of submerged objects.  “Carel said matter of factly, “This probably isn’t a good time or place for us to go into the water,” Johnson remembers.  “Our paddling was a bit more timid.”

Timid is not a word ever applied to Brest van Kempen’s portfolio. Achieving “master” classification with the Society of Animal Artists, he has been a perennial winner in SAA shows for decades, including netting numerous awards. “He’s never been an artist who runs with a pack,” Johnson says.
 
Born in the Beehive State, Best van Kempen was raised in an immigrant family. His father, obviously of Dutch ancestry, hails from Indonesia where the Brest van Kempens had been since the 18 century.  After revolution swept through the East Indies in 1948, bringing an end to colonial rule, the elder Brest van Kempen relocated to Holland.

His father’s second cousin converted to the LDS faith and ended up emigrating to Utah, the family connection bringing Carel’s father to the state as well. And, in the desert, he met Carel’s mother. There’s been a “Carel Pieter” in the Brest van Kempen family line for several generations. “I'm the 3rd Carel Pieter, and the 5th in consecutive generations of Carels,” he says.

Today, Brest van Kempen considers himself an atheist, though he is open to the possibility of being surprised by evidence of a rational cosmic architect; he just hasn’t found concrete evidence of it yet.

By good fortune, he spent his childhood, he says, in the rural countryside around Emigration Canyon, the place where Brigham Young helped lead religious followers through mountains to the promised land.  Brest van Kempen had access to terrain that extends from cactus-covered lower desert to snow packed peaks. When WAJ caught up with him, he was headed out there again on a solo camping trip to scout for raptors and whatever else he could turn up under rocks.

Life verges upon art, and vice versa, throughout his body of work, tipping his hat to biology and to fine art.  Consider his "Two Stories—Common Nighthawk," homage to Edward Hopper.  In his 1942 painting, "Nighthawks," Hopper portrayed humans in a diner amid noirish light. Brest van Kempen takes the focus up into the sky just below an urban streetlight where a hawk preys on moths gathering around the incandescence.

Brest van Kempen’s side-longed way of seeing is innate and his sensitivities as a naturalist are the lens through which he ponders human survival. While he cherishes the artists in North America who contributed to the evolution of modern fields guides starting most ambitiously with John James Audubon, he wants to achieve more than imparting information.  He is reverential in his regard for the splendid diversity of species in the biota, yet he has a despot’s irreverence for Disneyfied art that over-idealizes and over-romanticizes nature.  Like political philosophical Thomas Hobbes, he knows that life in a state of nature can be cruel, brutish and short.

Brest van Kempen started responding to the natural world with a graphite pencil in his hand when he was 12. “If you looked at the stuff I was drawing then, it wasn’t very good, but I was interested in the same kinds of things that interest me now.”

As a kid, he had a copy of Audubon’s elephantine portfolio Birds in America.  “I spent a lot of time looking at it and copying pictures.  Audubon was a huge early influence but I also had a Bible that was illustrated with scenes by Rembrandt.”  Walton Ford has made a career out of spoofing Audubon.  Brest van Kempen takes a different approach, though he praises Ford and Rockman.

Moving through college, Brest van Kempen poured himself into Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Albrecht Durer and Salvador Dali, whose magical realism gave him a license, he thought, to wander out of bounds.

It may surprise people, but one of Brest van Kempen’s mentors is Belgian hyper-photo-realist Carl Brenders.  He approached Brenders two decades ago and asked for an honest critique. “I’ve been fortunate to know people who have been very kind, not always complementary with their criticism but forthright.  I don’t paint to win praise. Carl gave me information I needed and you can see the difference in how I painted before that meeting and afterward.”

He reveres Brenders for staying true to himself.  “I think the work he does is wonderful.  I love it.  It’s his signature.  I have a great deal of respect.  I didn’t know it was possible to paint detailed work with such depth and richness.”

Brenders, in turn, describes Brest van Kempen as “a phenomenon in the world of art,” which should not imply a lack of struggle.

Explains Johnson,  “He once told me, ‘Cole, don’t follow the money. Do your work and let the money come.'  That is what Carel has always done without being told.  On the other hand, he knows what adversity is. The guy has had his ups and downs. I mean, for awhile, he lived in a van that he sometimes parked down by a river.”



Brest van Kempen didn’t start painting seriously until he was 30 years old.  His first passions were falconry and field biology. Almost half of his adult life ago, he started submitting works to shows and was accepted into a national exhibition of mostly waterfowl paintings in Kansas City hosted by Ducks Unlimited.

“I looked at all those waterfowl paintings and then at my work and I thought I was doing it all wrong.  Fortunately, that feeling didn’t last too long but when I look at the quality of the things I was painting. I’m surprised at how technically bad it was.” He shares an anecdote about how, in his mid twenties he was feeling confident and sent what he considered his six best paintings to a juried show sponsored by the Salt Lake Arts Council.  All six were rejected.

“It’s been a long process.  I still am learning.  I am always learning,” he says.

Back in 1992, his resolve to be a painter was given its toughest test. Brest van Kempen was staying in a rented house trying to pay the bills on money earned from painting.  His works were not selling and he struck a deal with his landlord to pay off his lodging debt with new works.  Eventually, he had to move out, putting all of his belongings in storage and then living in a van along with a few changes of clothes and painting materials.

For a while, he even lived in an abandoned building and warehouse with squatters.  The little money he had he used for gas to keep traveling to wildland areas to observe wildlife.  He kept painting until, finally, his works attracted critical attention at art shows, galleries and collectors. Based on the limited proceeds of sales, he pieced together a backpacking trip through Central America—this when guerilla wars and military juntas racked the region.

When did he start "seeing" what had gone unseen by others, and was it an epiphany?   “When I went to the tropics, I was pretty surprised at how it was just as a I imagined.  I think a lot of artists kind of bullshit about all the work they do when they travel because it makes them feel less guilty about writing off a vacation, but I went to study.”  Becoming subsumed in the natural surroundings is important, he says, and spending time in the field gives an artist something to say.  But what really matters is the churning that occurs in the imagination.

Since the 1990s, when edginess became a trademark, his work has won recognition, curator Wagner says.  “I’ve never had bouts of painter’s block,” Brest van Kempen notes. “ I have never been plagued by sitting down and scratching my head when it comes to ideas for a new painting. Ideas flow.”

Typically, he works on one piece from start to finish.  “I’m always doing a lot of sketching and working out ideas.  I’m constantly doing that, little sketches. I have boxes bull of sketches.  I occasionally open up a box of reference from something I did 10 years ago.  I wasn’t in a position to make use of it then, but it’s valuable to me now.”

What few people realize is that before Brenders perfected his inimitable technique of bringing more than photographic pixel exactness to a surface, he started as a naturalist, just like Brest van Kempen, fascinated by the interactions of different species in the food chain.

The struggle for survival is happening around us every day, epically, even if the scale is microscopic, Brest van Kempen says.   He knows that 21stcentury society is resistant to taking a long hard look at itself, yet depictions of nature, especially surreal portrayals of it, can serve as a mirror.

Brest van Kempen has an intellectual scientific understanding of his subjects. He is a founding board member of a new organization called Science Art-Nature devoted to interpreting and celebrating the ongoing role that art has in scientific study.  Artist Tony Angell is also on the board, as is  Brest van Kempen, famed Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, biologst Donald Kennedy, Pamela Meadowcroft, and Darryl Whele. 

While Brest van Kempen is neither a snob nor out for laughs, he cleverly portrays interactions that fly over the heads of viewers whose only understanding of nature comes from watching the Discovery Channel.

“I always find his work intriguing,” says Kathy Foley, director of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin.  “You can enjoy it on multiple levels.  To get the maximum out of it, you have to work really hard as viewer.  That means going beyond the superficial.  His humor may not always be obvious.”
 
Brest van Kempen does not stand in judgment of his colleagues, but neither is he interested in pursuing garden variety approaches to wildlife art that have nothing to say or little affinity for the biological crisis facing the planet.  “I’m a little bit contemptuous.  All of us in this country are so divorced from nature and our involvement in it,” he explains.  “The whole dialogue about conservation is so misinformed and with regard to wildlife art, so much of it just sings from the same hymnal.”

He knows the chapters and verses because he, too, once sang from them.
“I didn’t know anything about contemporary wildlife art until I began exhibiting in shows and ‘contemporary wildlife’ was the only category that bore any likeness to what I was trying to say.”

He does exert artistic license in pairing different species together. “In my work, I nearly always try to deal with truths of natural history, but different truths call for different approaches. More often than not, the approach is a direct sort of story telling that's not difficult to understand. When I invent a situation I've never seen nor heard of, biological credibility is an important consideration,” he says.

Anthropomorphism is a present danger whenever engaging in such exaggeration. My rule of thumb is to take care when comparing a non-human's behavior to my own, but when the situation is reversed to throw caution to the wind. The intent is to stretch the immediate truth a bit to express a greater truth than a photographic representation could, without falling into the mire of anthropomorphism.”
 
“No other wildlife artist that I know, consistently, takes the kinds of creative risks that Brest van Kempen takes in his selection of subjects and activities,” says art historian Wagner.  “To compete and make money in the art business, the vast majority of wildlife paints paint in-demand subjects, which, with repetition, become clichés.  Fortunately, there are still some collectors who understand and value true creativity.”  Brest van Kempen does indeed have a rabid group of collectors.

The art book “Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding–The Art of Carel Pieter Brest Van Kempen” is an exhilarating and eccentric display of both his paintings and the thoughts behind what motivates him as an observer.  He takes readers off road into a wilderness where few other biographies dare to tread. [Read this provocative exerpt of an essay he wrote ].  Rigor Vitae is also the title of a blog he writes.  His pieces are always smart and sharply written, dishing out jabs where they need to be meted and throwing ruminations on art, wildlife, and human hubris into a big blender and pushing the ‘On” button.

Although he lives for his encounters, Brest van Kempen isn’t convinced that humankind has the will to part with its own creature conveniences and gluttony in order to avert ecological catastrophe.  The only concession is that the nature he loves will endure, in a form that gives rise to new predator and prey dynamics, some perhaps even beyond his own wildest dreams.  The only downside: he won’t be there to witness.
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Besides the Springville Art Museum and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, Brest van Kempen’s works are in the collection of the World Center of Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and the Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont.  For a virtual tour of the show and for an expanation of  the natural history behind each painting, click here to reach Brest van Kempen's blog.