Johnny Be Good by Todd Wilkinson

ART & ETC

Johnny Be Good Fearless in the face of threats to wild places, John Banovich uses his art to inspire millions to embrace conservation in what some call “The Banovich Effect.”

T

he other day, during a long engrossing conversation with a prominent art collector, I was regaled with tales of John Banovich’s derring-do: The time, for instance, when he waded into a murky water hole in Zimbabwe, his head barely above the surface as he held camera in hand. Standing perfectly still, he was waiting for a bull elephant to come in for its usual evening drink.

But that’s not even the dramatic part. Before Banovich stepped into the pool, he had been told there were resident crocodiles and temperamental hippos in those clear Okovango waters.

Assessing the odds, he still insisted he do it—all for the sake of gathering research material so he could deliver a more authentic tusker painting.

There are, in fact, many such stories about Banovichian forays into the African bush, involving encounters with species ranging from rhinos to Cape buffalo on foot, moments when he’s been positioned between a lion pride and prey species and a leopard that tried to climb into trees where he was observing, mistakenly believing he was out of the big cat’s reach.

Hearing this, one might believe Banovich to be a reckless eyewitness in creating some of the most gripping scenes ever portrayed by a wildlife artist. While he is often described as a force of nature every bit as charismatic as the large megafauna he celebrates, his risk-taking actually involves a lot of careful calculation and that includes reassuring his wife, Amy, that he knows what he’s doing.

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BY TODD WILKINSON Tellingly, when I asked the art collector who he thought might play Banovich on the big screen were a movie ever made about his life, without hesitation he replied, “Tom Cruise”—the actor famous for doing much of his own stunt work in the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise, for possessing a physicality in the way he carries himself and always emanating an intense, workman-like devotion to his craft.

Banovich might blanch at the leading man comparison, but what he cannot deny is how his presence as a painter, using art to try to bring more people into the cause of wildlife conservation, is today unsurpassed. There’s no living artist out there trying to protect African animals and their habitat with the same tenacity he does. By his own admission, and thinking about the future his daughters will inhabit, he fears that we’re running out of time to save biodiversity as we know it now. Banovich’s antidote to despair: Trying to instill more awe.

This kid from the rough and tumble copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, has come a long way in his life. Although Banovich will say he stands reverentially on the shoulders of greater African wildlife artists who came before him—from Wilhelm Kuhnert to Bob Kuhn, and including people like Englishman David Shepherd, Canadian Robert Bateman, Kenyan Simon Combes and others inbetween—what distinguishes him is his hyperkinetic determination to have others join him in the fight.

Banovich doesn’t care if people label him a tree hugger though he makes it clear that his fiercest allies are found in the hunting community, and they include some prominent businesspeople.

Dan Cabela, a member of the famous clan who established Cabela’s as an American powerhouse in the hunting and fishing industry, refers to something that he informally calls “The Banovich Effect.” “John’s work has always spoken to me, as I know it does to millions of people, especially his African scenes and portrayals of the Big Five,” he said. “That’s impressive but I’ve always thought that one of John’s greatest strengths is being able to bring people together for various conservation causes. He’s been an important catalyst.”

“John does such amazing stuff and whether you like African subject matter or not, his work leaps out at you,” says Chris Dorsey, the sportsman and awardwinning filmmaker who today is working on a series of new nature documentaries scheduled to premiere in I-MAX theatres.

Dorsey remembers attending the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston. He turned a corner and encountered Banovich’s homage to a covey of bobwhite quail. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, this is really spectacular.’

John is synonymous with African species and I had no idea of the breadth and scope of his work. He uses his art as a vehicle, as a means to an end, and the end is conservation.”

Dorsey not long after wrote a profile of Banovich for Forbes magazine. “He and his bride are like Tarzan and Jane, right out of central casting, but they are really down to earth. Once you get to know John, however, you realize there’s so many layers to the onion. And when you parlay that into conservation, it means working across many different fronts that go way beyond the love affair people have with his art. David Attenborough and others have said people don’t protect what they S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

don’t care about it, and they can’t care if they don’t know about. Educating people and getting them to care so that they step up to protect species is a big part of who he is. He lives that ethic.”

Banovich has always pushed the envelope to achieve effect. As his stature rose in the early years of this new millennium, he became a main drawing card and an artist mainstay at shows like Safari Club International. He also was winning praise from critics and contemporaries among the Society for Animal Artists, the Salmagundi Club, AFC Artists for Conservation, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Birds in Art show, the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, the Hiram Blauvelt Museum and Western Visions, held every autumn at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole.

In Banovich’s oeuvre, epic is just what it suggests—huge canvasses that enable viewers to viscerally experience the scale of subjects. While he’s never painted a life-sized herd of elephants, he often creates scenes where we feel as if we could stroll into their volume of space.

In Once Upon A Time, Banovich portrayed a single life-sized elephant and he used it to draw international attention to ivory poaching. He believes that legitimate market forces are the only way to combat the illicit trade in tusks, rhino horn and other wildlife parts.

Not long ago, a one-man traveling exhibition, The King of Beasts: A Study of the African Lion, wowed viewers in venues where it appeared across the country. Troubling to Banovich, though, is a bifurcation—a split—that emerged in his base of collectors who purchased original work and his giclée originals. Calling it a divide comprised of “hunters” and “non-hunters” is too simplistic, for Banovich’s work has always held appeal, for example, among the spouses of sportsmen who hang his work in living rooms as decorative centerpieces—apart from the prominent display they receive in game rooms, dens, corporate offices and boardrooms.

At a time when it was vital for wildlife conservationists to be on the same page, animal rights activists wanted Banovich to distance himself from the hunting community or disavow it. He S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

John Banovich, Once Upon a Time, 2006, oil on Belgian linen, 120 x 120 inches.

refused, seeking instead to try and bring people together in common cause.

In 2007, he and Amy founded the Banovich Wildscapes Foundation to bridge the chasm between “sportsmen conservationists” and “conservationist environmentalists.” He chose the word “wildscapes” because it speaks to terrain inhabited by wildlife embracing intact ecosystems and it can be approached as a realm for creatively solving conflict.

He often says that wherever there is a deeply divided group of advocates, it’s the animals on the ground that suffer most.

“Prior to the 1960s, these individuals and groups worked, for the most part, in tandem on environmental and conservation issues. Today you see the groups working independently because of differences in fundamental beliefs that either wildlife is a resource to be used, or wildlife should have individual rights and be protected at all costs…even at the cost of the species as a whole,” he explains. “The reality is that wildlife must be utilized, both

consumptively and non-consumptively— depending on the landscape— and local people must benefit from its presence.

If not, the wildlife will disappear. I call this the second inconvenient truth.”

Conservation that becomes a debt proposition to communities and private landowners will not last and the challenge is finding ways to make animals assets instead of liabilities. “Today wildlife must pay in order to stay. In an ever-exploding human population of nearly eight billion and growing, wildlife must bring value to communities; it must compete economically with other land use choices.” Wildscapes, he notes, is committed to identifying, highlighting and improving sets of options.

Many of the most ardent Banovich collectors are hunters as are their spouses, but the appeal of his art extends across the gamut. Two decades ago, Banovich had heard of a misadventure involving tech entrepreneur Tom Siebel in Africa when a charging cow elephant left him

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ART & ETC physically pummeled and in danger of dying. The artist had hoped to one day meet Siebel but serendipity had another plan in mind. By pure coincidence, after Siebel survived and was on the mend, he wandered into Banovich’s booth at the SCI Convention in Las Vegas and introduced himself. He was blown away by a giant charging elephant painting that was purchased by Dick and Mary Cabela.

As a result of that meeting, Siebel enlisted the painter to re-create the scene of his mortal encounter. The piece transports the viewer to the last terrifying moments Siebel faced before the elephant struck.

“This painting will always be one of the most personal works I have ever created. It took extensive research to accurately portray the profound event that changed Tom’s life forever and the painting will tell the story for generations to come,” Banovich says.

I interviewed Siebel for a story about Banovich and he appreciates art as a tool for igniting cultural awakening. Banovich recalls taking a walk with Seibel and investment guru Charles Schwab at Seibel’s hunting retreat in California. “They were familiar with my conservation work and treated me as a peer. They were working on ways to bring innovation to the world’s challenges. The conversation segued from me listening to them discuss ‘the internet of things’ and how it’s revolutionizing the world to the dire circumstances for wildlife in the U.S., the history of conservation, bison, Native Americans and the function of ecosystems of the West.

Often, Banovich will meet someone, share the details of an experience he’s had in the field, and how a conservation outcome could be improved through more help and cooperation. “John’s enthusiasm is infectious,” Cabela says.

“He makes others feel important. He’ll describe an opportunity to make things better. He’ll look you in the eye, explain how you can make a positive difference and then ask, ‘Will you help me?’”

Many people have answered the call. What’s extraordinary is how the spirit of stewardship preached by Banovich has been brought back to North America. A prime exponent of that is Ben Strickling, III, a Midland, Texas,based venture capitalist with a special expertise in the oil and gas industry. He has undertaken wildlife conservation

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as a passion project on a family ranch in New Mexico outside of Santa Fe. A few years ago, he and his wife bought a ranch along the Pecos River that had been owned by actor Val Kilmer. Kilmer had begun projects to heal historic overgrazing by cattle. Strickland brought restoration to another level. At the time, just 20 percent of the Pecos streambanks were shaded. A massive program of revegetation with willows increased it to 80 percent, resulting in a six degree drop in water temperature and a rebound in numbers of rainbows, browns, tiger trout and cutbows. The ranch had no elk but now several dozen frequent the ranch. Further, a resident mule deer herd has grown from 100 to 400.

Banovich says that Strickling is a model of how individual people can make an impact through their actions. In turn, Strickling says that Banovich inspires him and every day he looks at several major Banoviches on the wall he owns as a reminder.

“John has been an indirect mentor of mine in how to interact with a wide cross section of people. He has millionaires and billionaires who collect his work but when you walk into a room with him in rural Africa, you discover that by being friends with John you are automatic friends with people who are on the front lines of conservation.”

Strickland has hunted in Africa plenty and gone there on an equal number of humanitarian missions with his church. “I’ve seen many sides of the African community,” he says. It doesn’t matter where on the planet, he notes, but conservation endures when wildlife is viewed as an asset by those who live closest to it, not a liability.

More and more, Banovich is feeling pulled back to home ground to his native West. He maintains a painting studio in Paradise Valley, Montana.

[His last one there was purchased by musician John Mayer.]

In Montana, in the main lodge of the Yellowstone Club, there’s a massive 14-foot Banovich painting, Cold Air-Deep Power, of bison stampeding through heavy snow in the direction of the viewer. The painting was a metaphor, intended to have the extended family present in the bison herd to reflect not only the value of social

togetherness but the intrepid spirit of adventure. The research for the work had been done nearby on Ted Turner’s Flying D Ranch where more than 5,000 bison roam.

“I wanted the painting to show the familial aspect of the Yellowstone Club with bison in all stages of life,” Banovich said. “And, of course, you have the snow, which is an integral part of the club and animals native to this region, plowing their way through amazing powder. In my work as a conservationist I have found so many situations where wildlife is beleaguered by humans, but this shows a native animal in a natural setting unfettered by humans and civilization. One hundred years from now I hope we are blessed to live in a world where this iconic beast roams free.”

Standing at the intersection where one river set in history entered the channel of an even mightier one, Banovich not long ago was having a flashback. Looking downstream, toward a labyrinth where twisting braided flows literally cut through geologic time, he thought of explorers’ diaries and famous painters who chronicled a truly breathtaking mass of megafauna some two centuries earlier.

Not far from the confluence, one of the leaders had written (the following is word for word without spellcheck): “I assended to the high Country and from an eminance I had a view of the plains for a great distance. From this eminance I had a view of a greater number of buffalow than I had ever Seen before at one time. I must have Seen near 20,000 of those animals feeding on this plain.”

In the years that came after that account, a wave of fine artists followed in their wake, producing a visual imagery of a vast landscape of diversity that near the end of the century had collapsed.

He’s been along the Mara River in the Masai Mara and witnessed hundreds of thousands of wildebeest flanked by zebra, lions, Cape buffalo and a wide array of smaller ungulates. Banovich is determined not to let the same chain of events happen in Africa but he also has not given up on the heart of the West.

When Banovich had the opportunity to have a minority stake in an old ranch near the confluence of the Judith and Missouri Rivers in Montana, his senses left him giddy. ln many ways he was coming full circle. Having originally gone to Africa S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

John Banovich, Cold Air - Deep Powder, oil on Belgian linen, 72 x 168 inches, Private Commission for Yellowstone Club.

to witness wildlife abundance, he sees promise for rewilding in the wide-open spaces of the West. It’s why he’s now on the board of directors of American Prairie where he serves alongside the venerable Montana landscape painter Clyde Aspevig.

Another major figure closely associated with American Prairie is the filmmaker and historian Ken Burns. American Prairie has an ambitious goal to establish a 3.2 million acre preserve—one and a half times the size of Yellowstone—that will hold as many free-ranging prairie species as possible and have free-ranging bison inside its perimeter serving as the vital keystone animal.

“Africa opened my eyes to not only a vision of what’s possible, but the potential of what we could lose, and if the latter happens on our watch, it will be a devastating statement about what we were willing to let slip away,” he said. “I want to prevent it from happening.”

Just 200 years ago, there were an estimated 30 million bison inhabiting the open, treeless West, affording sights as spectacular as the wildebeest migration across the Serengeti. Within the span of a single century, that number had collapsed to just a few thousand and it’s said the modern era of wildlife conservation was born with bold rescue efforts carried out

by Theodore Roosevelt, William Hornaday, George Bird Grinnell and others.

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American Prairie is devoted to ecological restoration and even allows hunting as a management tool. It’s a model that has earned high praise not only from scientists but conservations such as Banovich.

“The best hope of saving the wild places we love comes down to two simple notions—protecting the landscapes that are still healthy and functioning and, secondly, revitalizing environments that can be restored. That’s as true for Africa as it is for the American West,” Banovich says.

“Together, we can reverse the trendline of a projected net loss, but we have to be smart and diligent. We need to focus on the things that unite us and find a way to get past the things that divide us.”

One of the aims of Banovich and his two partners on their own ranch is to bring bison back. Consummate habitat creators on the short- and mixed-grass prairie, and animals whose survival has been tested by time, bison are totem beings for indigenous tribes. They also were celebrated by artists along the Missouri River corridor going back to George Catlin, Karl Bodmer in the 1830s and later documented by Montana western artist Charles M. Russell who has a national wildlife refuge named after him.

The late William G. Kerr, who cofounded the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, told me before he passed that Banovich would be worthy company with the finest artists who

painted the West in the 19th century and whose work hangs today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. “He’s not out there simply trying to be a great artist, which is difficult enough by itself. John wants to be a change agent and based on everything I’ve seen, he’s succeeded,” Kerr said.

Employing many of the same lessons learned in Africa, Banovich believes that North American hunters can again reassert themselves at the forefront of conservation, finding a way forward that involves co-existence between local people, cowboy culture and re-wilding.

If it works, it can help keep people on the land and open a whole new era.

Remarkably, Banovich believes he is only getting started in the next phase of his life. In January 2024, he turns 60 years old and will embark on his 60th African safari. “I’m more excited than ever thinking about what’s possible. This life has given me so much more than I could have dreamed of. Whatever difference my art can make, I’m happy about, but mostly I love rallying alongside passionate people who want to do good. This is what inspires me to confront the future.” ■

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