Artist of a different stripe

Scott Wilson is an anchored kind of guy. Enjoys the outdoors, but likes his outdoors safe and close by. That’s why he can appreciate someone like Kim Diment, an artist and former schoolteacher who travels the bush of Africa for artistic inspiration.
Diment met Wilson five years ago. She was a vision walking through the door; a slim blond with the natural good looks of a model, holding a painting of a mountain lion that she spotted in the Teton Mountains. She wanted Wilson, a color specialist, to photograph and reproduce it as a limited edition.
So began the working relationship between a wildlife artist and a Traverse City technology geek.
“Knowing Kim has been kind of an awakening,” he says. “Here she is on safaris, taking photos of wild animals, endangered species. She’s a lot like the guy I used to watch on Mutual of Omaha when I was a kid.
“Do I live through her vicariously? In a way, yes; she has pretty interesting stories and transfers her experiences to her paintings. She has a picture of a leopard in a tree, Hidden Fury. That leopard was really pissed off that they had come that close and she really captures that in his eyes.”

THE GREVY ZEBRA
Their most recent project involves the Grevy zebra, which is dangerously close to extinction—less than 2,500 are left in the world. The Grevy zebra has two things going against it; first, its more complex striping makes beautiful rugs and wall hangings and is prized by poachers. But the bigger problem is human encroachment. Its extremely shy nature makes it more than willing to yield its water holes to humans and cattle, and without a steady source of water, the female will not reproduce.
Diment, who lives in Grayling, went to Kenya last summer to photograph the Grevy zebra and spent the winter months painting them. Her plan is to sell limited reproductions in order to raise money for the Lewa Conservancy, where about 500 of the zebra browse and reproduce in peace.
Wilson, who owns Vada Color, used his technical prowess to produce Giclèe prints of her paintings. Pronounced zhee-clay, these are art reproductions using a combination of high-end inkjet printers and digital imaging equipment. Archival inks, paper or canvas are used. Sales of the reproduced art will go toward the fundraiser (for details, call Kim Diment at 989-344-1843 or go to the website,
www.lewa.org).
The Lewa Conservancy will also auction her original painting in London, England, this fall.

INTO AFRICA
Diment grew up in Oscoda across the road from state land. An unapologetic tomboy, she spent her summers collecting pollywogs and saving injured birds. Her dad gave her a pair of rummage sale binoculars in junior high, and she took them everywhere, along with a sketch pad.
Her brother tagged her “nature girl,” and she called him “path boy” because he feared getting off the trail and bushwacking in the woods.
She double-majored in fine arts and zoology in college, and toured England searching out rare birds with her supervising science teacher, who quit soon afterward to guide international birding trips. The die was cast. She would spend the rest of her life seeking out wildlife in corners of faraway places and painting them.
But first she had to make a living. Diment worked for several years as a teacher before saving enough for a trip to Kenya at the age of 29. She decided to join a tour group since she knew nothing about the country. But when she arrived, she couldn’t communicate with the others at the tourist resort, mostly Germans and some French: “I almost shit myself! I couldn’t understand a word they said.”
Fortunately, she met a group of Canadian ladies who shared her passion for the wild side. The trip was salvaged and she was hooked.
Diment again saved up her money to take a trip two years later to the Amazon basin in Ecuador. There she spent eight days with the Cofan Indians. The tribal chief was an ex-patriate American who had grown up in a missionary and married a village Indian. He welcomed small groups of Americans to live like Cofan Indians for a week, go on guided hikes, and paddle downriver in dugout canoes.
Two or three days into it, her group ran out of supplies and their stomachs started rumbling. They got by on meals of turtle and banana, until the chief suggested they might need to kill a peccary, a type of wild pig. Before the hunt, the chief warned them not to get separated from the Indians. “He told us if the peccary turned on us, to make damn sure we got up a tree. The chief of the tribe killed it, using a gun. We had it for the next couple of days and it tasted very much like pork. It was quite good.”

ROUGH GUIDE
Two years later in 1994, she went to Namibia and fell for the safari guide. For the next five years, they visited back and forth from Namibia and Alpena, where she taught art. Unfortunately, the guide wasn’t keen on monogamy or living in Northern Michigan, so after a last-gasp, six month visit to Namibia in 1999, Diment broke up with him.
Just about that time, Diment became more serious about gaining recognition for her art. She submitted three paintings into a juried, international art show, “Wild Cat Art 2001” held in Fresno and Beverly Hills, California. Another Northern Michigan artist, T.J. Lick of Boyne Falls, also entered two pieces. Amazingly, the two relatively obscure Northern Michigan artists had their pieces accepted into the show. Even more impressive — Lick placed first in the big cat competition, while Diment took second in smaller cat paintings.
Simon Combes, a judge for the contest, and his wife Kat befriended the artists, taking them to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Park to see the towering sequoia trees.
“He was just in awe. ‘Can you imagine what these trees have seen? How can someone cut down so much history?’ You saw that when he looked at animals, he was just in love with the natural world and there are no words for that.”
Combes invited the two Michigan artists on a 2004 artist safari in Kenya. For once, Diment was surrounded by fellow artists who were as impassioned as she was about wildlife art and loved the adrenaline of getting up close for a good photo.
At times, however, adrenaline flowed into a river of terror. Diment recalls the time a hippo attacked their camp.
“They had set up camp in a new area, I imagine it had been the hippo’s territory,” she said. “One of the people on the safari was taking pictures and got too close to the hippo — we were set up in a giant grassland, and it was an oasis in this dry grassland.”
The hippo followed the photographer back to camp and went wild. It charged at trees and killed an armed guard. Someone shot it, but it continued to charge, demolishing two tents. Combes drove up in a Land Rover in the middle of the attack, with Diment and several artists with him. He jumped into another Land Rover and tried driving away the hippo. Unfazed, the hippo bit the vehicle. Meanwhile, four camp attendants piled in with Diment. No one could move, they were so tightly packed in. They collectively gasped when the hippo resurfaced 75 yards away, eyeing the Land Rover as if mulling whether to charge. The beast snorted and headed toward the Mara River.

DEATH OF AN ARTIST
For Combes, a seasoned traveler, it was just another day of terrifying encounters. But just a month later, he was killed by a cape buffalo. He and his wife were hiking an ancient volcano near their home in Africa’s Great Rift valley. A buffalo came out of nowhere and charged Combes, while his wife futilely threw rocks trying to divert the buffalo’s attention. The tragedy caused Diment to pause about her own life and ambitions. Like Diment, Combes had planned and schemed to find a way to make a living as a wildlife artist. He lived on an 800-acre farm in Kenya and routinely risked his life in remote corners of the world.
He once wrote: “If I had to choose one sentence which has had more influence on my life, got me into more trouble, created more dramas, caused more adrenaline surges or enabled more dreams to come true, it would be, ‘I bet you can’t.’”
But Diment said she came to realize that Combes, 63, died doing what he loved, instead of declining slowly into old age. She decided to continue to pursue her fascination with wildlife and contacted a Kenyan woman who works to save Africa’s endangered species.
The woman’s name is Belinda Low and she heads up the Northern Rangeland’s Endangered Species Program. They formed a friendship through emails sent back and forth. Low was able to look at Diment’s art on her website (thanks to Rod Lawrence, a local webmaster and wildlife artist) and decided that Diment could help the cause through her art. So last summer, Diment traveled to Kenya and spent seven days in the bush with a Masaii guide, Simbiri, photographing the Grevy zebra. He couldn’t speak English and Diment couldn’t speak Swahili. They communicated with “baby words” and lots of hand gestures and facial expressions. Diment would draw an animal’s tracks in the sand, and Simbiri would tell her the name of the animal.
PAINTING ZEBRAS
Diment, who married a doctor three years ago and can now devote herself full-time to art, spent the next several months painting the major Grevy zebra piece, along with three smaller profiles. It includes contemporary symbolism, something that has evolved in her African art pieces: “People who typically don’t care for wildlife art have found it very appealing,” she said.
Wilson donated 60 hours of his time on the project—a project, he said, that was an “awakening” for him. He had no idea that there were two species of zebra, much less how close the Grevy is to extinction.
Diment acknowledges that the sheer scale of recent human disasters overshadow the plight of an obscure species of zebra. But she also believes that the existence of humans and animals are intertwined.
“The zebra is the canary in a coal mine. If you let one species go, then another, it gets easier to keep sacrificing. Pretty soon it’s gotten away from you. I look at the world as a giant organism and the different species are important, vital parts. A healthy organism needs all of its functioning parts to survive. I hope someday we figure this out for our children’s sakes.”



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