Painter Alan Campbell's interest in science has made him an interpreter of both the beauty of nature and the ills that mankind is wreaking on the planet.
Painter Alan Campbell's interest in science has made him an interpreter of both the beauty of nature and the ills that mankind is wreaking on the planet.
B Y - K E N T - H A N N O N
lan Campbell is suspended in a rope harness 120 feet in the air, with one foot in the world of art and the other in the world of science. Exhausted from a muddy trek in a four-by-four followed by several miles of hiking, he has struggled for 30 minutes to hoist himself to this precarious perch--which would be inaccessible to human beings were it not for a combination of modern ingenuity and old-fashioned marksmanship. Using a crossbow, Campbell's scientist companion was able to create the harness by looping a 2,000-pound test line into the upper reaches of one of Mother Nature's most valuable--and vanishing--resources:
The tropical rainforest.
"My first reaction to being there was that you hear more than you actually see," says Campbell (BFA '73, MFA '76), who has journeyed from his Jackson Street studio in Athens to some of the most remote locales on the planet--Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, the Serengeti--to paint what most human beings will never see for themselves. Campbell is a storyteller, as well as an artist, and in recent years the interplay between art and science has come to define his career.
 To get to Antarctica, the artist passed 10,000 icebergs. A sample page from Campbell's Costa Rica sketch book (top of page behind title) previews the painting to come. Visit this page for a closer view. |
In this case, "there" is Costa Rica, where, as Campbell noted in his journal after his breathtaking rope climb to the treetops, "the vegetation is so dense that it's hard to see a single butterfly."
The butterflies are there, make no mistake. Bats, too, as well as leaf-cutting ants and a collection of colorful and exotically patterned frogs that defy anything a Disney animator could create. Snakes? You bet.
In fact, 70 percent of the plant and animal species in the world are represented in tropical rainforests. When a portion of the rainforest is burned, bulldozed, or clear-cut, those species are threatened--some to extinction.
"Rainforests make up 6 percent of the land surface of the world--roughly equivalent to the size of the United States," says Campbell, who was invited to Costa Rica by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a consortium of 54 universities (including UGA) and the Smithsonian Institution. "But we're also losing an area of the rainforest the size of South Carolina every year. When my parents were born, 50 percent of the world's virgin forest was still intact. Today, it's down to 20 percent."
Campbell is interested in Costa Rica because it's the only place on the Caribbean slope of Central America that exhibits such a contiguous gradient of rainforest elevations--from near sea level at OTS's La Selva Biological Research Station, which Campbell visited last February, to the extinct Barva Volcano (elevation: 10,000 feet) in Braulio Carillo National Park. Costa Rica is home to more than 800 species of birds, 10,000 species of plants, and 2,000 species of trees. La Selva also boasts 450 different kinds of ants--some so strong that a line of them can move a kilogram of leaf material in a single night.
"The calls of howler monkeys are haunting at night," says Campbell, who also recalls a scene where a dozen dozing bats hung from a tree limb all in a neat little row. He photographed them, and one day they'll be immortalized in a painting that will serve as a visual record of an ecosystem at risk.
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Campbell has journeyed from his Athens studio to some of the most remote locales on the planet to paint what most people will never see for themselves. Case in point: Antarctica, which Campbell has visited three times. To learn more about Campbell, visit his Web site at www.ecoartist.com. |
Campbell's OTS hosts say they chose him for the Costa Rica project because of the aptitude he showed for nature in another climate zone.
"He did a remarkable set of paintings in Antarctica," says OTS director Gary Hartshorn. "I thought, 'Oh, boy, if this man is willing to come to the tropical rainforest, it will be helpful to us in educating the public.'"
Some of Campbell's Costa Rica paintings were part of the "Journeys and Discoveries" exhibit at the State Botanical Garden in Athens this fall. The exhibit is scheduled for the Sibley Horticulture Center at Callaway Gardens from February 21 to April 18, 1999, and at a later date for the Addison-Ripley Gallery in Washington, D.C., where Campbell will also do a slide show at the Smithsonian. These watercolors depict passion flowers in full bloom and ferns the size of elephant ears. But in the course of his visit, Campbell also witnessed the devastation caused by both large corporations and small farmers. When he finishes his Costa Rica paintings, that, too, will be reflected in his work.
"Large corporations such as Dole and Chiquita are in Costa Rica," says Campbell, "but the small subsistence farmer is also a significant threat to the rainforest. As Pogo said, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us.'"
Campbell's Costa Rica paintings juxtapose brilliant sunsets and beautiful palm trees with stark, gray, clear-cut areas where a single walking palm is isolated on a hill. He began to see this kind of connection between art and science back in 1982, thanks to UGA's Sea Grant Program.
"The Sea Grant Program seized on the idea of doing something similar, though smaller in scale, to what NASA had done with Lamar Dodd on the Apollo moon shot," says Campbell. "That was art in service of science."
Campbell's interest in art and science was sparked by mentor Lamar Dodd's NASA paintings. His own inspiration came from excursions on a Sea Grant research vessel 100 miles off shore.
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Campbell likes to work on site, but the rainforest was so humid his paint wouldn't dry. He based most of his Costa Rica paintings on photos like this one of a butterfly. |
Dodd was Campbell's major professor at UGA, and seeing his mentor's NASA paintings inspired Campbell to take two week-long painting trips on a Sea Grant research vessel 100 miles off-shore. Those paintings--of sunrises and thunderstorms, and boats laying mile-long fishing cables with hooks--sold well. That was important because Campbell had sold very little as a community artist-in-residence in Valdosta from 1975-78. A studio fire brought him home to Watkinsville, where he spent a year and a half helping his family start a hog farm. Campbell could've opted for a full-time teaching position at Valdosta State, but he considered that the easy way out. The hog farm was anything but easy, so he took time off in 1979 to spend a month at the Ossabaw Island Project off the coast of Savannah. The experience was so enriching that he went back in 1981--the year he remembers making $8,000 on his paintings.
"It wasn't a lot of money," Campbell recalls. "But it sticks in my mind because, in spite of the starving artist image, poverty is no boon to creativity." His earnings doubled the next year and again the next. That's when he began to think he could paint full-time--"and still be in control of my life."
Campbell produced 80 paintings for his first big show, "Darien to St. Mary's," which grew out of his Sea Grant experience. It was exhibited at the Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga in 1983. The turning point in his career occurred four years later when the National Science Foundation sent him to Antarctica for the first of three trips to what Campbell calls "the ultimate abstraction of nature."
 To appreciate the enormity of the rainforest, and what we have to lose if it's destroyed, Campbell painted this tree rising above an ocean of plant life.
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On his most recent trip to Antarctica, Campbell flew to New Zealand and then hopped aboard an ice-breaker for a 2,500-mile trip from Ross Island to the Antarctic peninsula and Punta Arenas, Chile--passing 10,000 icebergs along the way. When he saw the Antarctic paintings, scientist William J. Green praised Campbell's artistic renderings of the earth's starkest, most pared-down landscape:
"It is perhaps not grandiose to say that we indeed need an artistic complement to our science--an art or poetry that can help us interpret and recreate its landscapes, the soft, almost preternatural quality of its light, the strange sense of deep, pre-human time that one feels there," says Green. "If we are to know Antarctica in this way, as a source of wonder, it will be through the arts."
Campbell's rainforest odyssey will continue with a return trip to Costa Rica and a first visit to Panama, where he will continue to focus on art that has a social conscience.
"Art purely for art's sake can get very in-bred--and narcissistic," he says. "Anyone fortunate enough to make their living in art should have a social responsibility of some kind--rather than just talking to themselves. That's not the prevailing mode of thought in some quarters, but I'm comfortable with it. The story-telling aspect of art hasn't changed since the cave-painting days. In my view, that's where the real excitement is in the art world."
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For UGA faculty and students, the Costa Rican rainforest is a place to put ecosystem theory into practice. This rain forest course is an outgrowth of a six-year-old master's program in conservation ecology and sustainable development, which is unique in the U.S., says institute director Ron Carroll.
"We really stress combining research, outreach, and policy management," says Cathy Pringle, a professor of aquatic ecology and conservation biology. For the past decade, Pringle has studied the severe water quality problems faced by communities in Costa Rica's Sarapiqui province, an area which surrounds the La Selva Biological Research Station where alumnus Alan Campbell was an artist-in-residence with the Organization for Tropical Studies. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, Pringle in turn supports several UGA graduate students, who translate her findings about water quality into programs for the local public.
Last summer, Doug Parsons implemented an Adopt-A-Stream program in San Vito, Costa Rica. "The outreach program gets local people involved in monitoring the river, testing for oxygen and nitrogen. Once they see that something could be wrong, they start taking action," says Parsons, a graduate student in conservation ecology and sustainable development. "We found a 10th grade class with a stream that runs through their school. That's the stream we're going to adopt."
Botany and genetics professor Jim Hamrick is investigating whether pollination can occur across patches where the forest has been cleared for pasture or coffee-planting. "There's no doubt--more and more of the forest is disappearing," says Hamrick. "But we're seeing that certain kinds of pollinators like insects and hummingbirds continue to move. It means the long-term effects of fragmentation will not lead to as much loss of genetic diversity."
Botany professors Chris Peterson and Bruce Haynes are studying rain forest regrowth in abandoned pastures, searching for factors that enhance an area's potential for regrowth. "Costa Rica is famous for having a larger proportion of land designated as national parks than anywhere," says Peterson. "Outside of those parks, though, it's got the highest rate of deforestation anywhere. Soon there won't be anything left but parks." |
ext May, a group of UGA undergrads will take a month-long sojourn through a real-life plant, animal, and bird laboratory as part of a new study abroad program in Costa Rica created by the Institute of Ecology. The students will migrate between three main locations: a rain forest, an undisturbed watershed, and a dry coastal forest. In each, they'll scratch the dirt and meet the locals, studying both the natural and the human landscape.
Laura Wexler