The Art of the Wild

For more than three decades, John Banovich has ventured into some of the world's most remote landscapes—not simply to paint wildlife, but to understand it. Internationally acclaimed for his monumental wildlife paintings, Banovich has built a career that transcends the gallery walls. As the founder of the Banovich Wildscapes Foundation, an accomplished safari curator, and a lifelong conservation advocate, he has dedicated himself to protecting the very places that inspire his art. Along the way, he forged a close friendship with fellow conservation visionary Ted Turner, whose commitment to preserving wild landscapes reinforced Banovich's own belief that conservation begins with giving wildlife a place to live.

For Banovich, art, travel, and stewardship are inseparable. Each expedition becomes research, every painting tells a story, and every journey is an opportunity to leave a landscape better than he found it. His philosophy of living well reflects that same purpose-driven approach. It's measured not by what we accumulate, but by what we contribute: to our communities, to the natural world, and to future generations. 

In this deeply personal and eye-opening conversation, Banovich reflects on a lifetime spent chasing wild places, creating meaningful art, and discovering that the richest life is one lived in service of something larger than oneself. He is, in the truest sense of the word, an American treasure.

Rebekah Iliff: Your career has taken you from remote wilderness areas across Africa and North America to galleries and collectors around the world. How has travel shaped your artistic perspective, and how do you think art helps people connect more deeply with the places they visit?

John Banovich: I believe in the transformative power of travel and art. Nourishing the human spirit through once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences creates a shared sense of global purpose. While reliving, or imagining, those experiences remind us to never stop pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Through purposeful travel, we come face to face with ourselves.

For me, travel has profoundly changed my artwork. Because I paint big things with big teeth that live in remote parts of the world, in order to understand the world that they inhabit, I need to stand on the ground that they exist on. I need to face some of the challenges that they face and begin to understand, not only at the local level but at the regional level, what these animals face to survive in what are inevitably human-dominated landscapes.

As for how art helps people connect more deeply with the places they visit, I think art is a way to take people back to something they experienced or to transport them somewhere they are going to travel in the future. Art is a portal into another world — a world that is either living in their memory or about to become a future memory. Art can also move, reveal, and inspire us to seek a deeper understanding about the world. It can put a face on an issue, a cause, and in the end perhaps create action.

RI: You’ve built a reputation not only as a wildlife artist but also as a passionate conservationist through the work of the Banovich Wildscapes Foundation. What inspired you to create the foundation?

JB: I had no interest in creating a foundation. None. The world did not need another foundation, and I wasn’t about to start one. That was my mindset for many years, until the early two-thousands when I realized that as I started to get others engaged in conservation through fiscal support (often through large grants or private foundations) I needed to be a better steward of how those dollars actually flowed through until they hit the ground. Prior to that, I would trust that the partner would handle it, but I never really knew how the money was being spent. So I realized that at some point, we needed our own foundation. In 2006, I started the Banovich Wildscapes Foundation.

Today our foundation is a public foundation that does grants all over the world. We focus on large conservation landscapes and the protection of those landscapes. We foster cooperative efforts to conserve both the wildlife and the people on those landscapes. And all of our efforts must lean toward better community development, where the well-being of those communities is linked to the landscapes and the wildlife they coexist with. So our foundation does work in wildlife-based economies.

RI: Through your travel and safari business, you help people experience some of the world’s most extraordinary wild places firsthand. What do you hope travelers take away from these journeys beyond simply seeing wildlife?

JB: We are here to serve as ambassadors to Earth while inspiring our clients. And we do that by sharing its secrets, its beauty, and its power with people who entrust us to curate remarkable experiences that make the world seem a little smaller, a bit brighter, and people more alike than different. 

Our trips focus on large conservation landscapes that are important wildlife corridors and important biomes, and they often lie outside of national parks. In sub-Saharan Africa, approximately seventy percent of all remaining habitat lies outside of national parks and reserves. So these conservancies, game management areas, and hunting concessions all play a huge role in providing places where wildlife can thrive.

We try to connect people to the story — the full story. We try to create ways that they can engage with it, and if they want to go deep, they can be part of it. But our number one goal is always to give them a feeling that because they were there, they left that place better than they found it.

RI: You’ve spoken about the concept of “consumptive utilization” in conservation. For readers who may be unfamiliar with the term, what does it mean, and why do you believe it plays an important role in wildlife management and habitat preservation?

JB: Approximately seventy percent of the remaining habitat in sub-Saharan Africa lies outside of protected areas. That is critical to understanding what incentivizes local communities that live in those regions—those multi-use zones and wildlife corridors—to tolerate wildlife. Wildlife must be seen as an economic asset rather than an economic burden to local communities, because at the end of the day, conservation success is determined at the local level.

There are two ways to make wildlife an economic asset to communities. One is through photographic or ecotourism, which is non-consumptive. The other is through consumptive utilization, which is hunting. Both are utilizing wildlife, just in different ways.

Hunting operations work in areas that are not picturesque, that are remote, that are difficult to get to, and often affected by tsetse flies. They work in areas where large amounts of capital cannot easily be invested in infrastructure. But they are also extremely resilient to the kinds of situations that arise on the continent, whether that is political instability, ethnic conflict, or disease outbreak. Hunters are a tough breed. They are far less likely to cancel a trip when instability arises, whether that instability is political, social, health-related, or even climatic. That resilience means revenue continues to flow into areas that are either not suitable for photographic tourism or will never realistically be converted to it.

And it is important to remember that in the areas lying outside of national parks and reserves, well over sixty percent in many countries is reliant upon consumptive utilization or carries some form of a consumptive utilization mandate. Because of that, hunting represents a greater source of economic support for wildlife across sub-Saharan Africa than photographic tourism does. It supports much larger landscapes across many more countries.

RI: Many of your paintings capture not just animals, but the landscapes, atmosphere, and emotion of a place. How do art and travel complement one another in your life, and can one truly understand the subject matter without experiencing the environment firsthand?

JB: It is critical to experience nature firsthand. I tell young artists, and artists of every skill level, the same thing: get out in the field. If you are an artist who is a storyteller, you have to understand the story from the inside out. You are not just creating pretty pictures. You are telling a story, and you cannot truly experience these landscapes without being there firsthand.

Travel and art go hand in hand for me. These trips are research. They are the way I come to understand my subject matter, not only from a human perspective but from the animal’s perspective. I get to stand on the sacred ground that they inhabit and move through their world—clumsily compared to the animals themselves, but I get to move through it nonetheless.

Art and travel complement my life because one serves the other. One makes the other better. I am a better artist because of my travels, because of the depth and impact of those experiences. And I am a better travel adviser because of thirty-some years of traveling the globe into the most remote places on Earth, discovering the character of these subjects and coming to understand the world they live in.

RI: You knew Ted Turner well. What is an interesting fact that perhaps most people didn’t know about him? Any fun anecdotes? What views did you share in terms of conservation?

JB: Ted Turner was a mentor to me. He was a man that I aspired to be like in many ways. I read his books. I loved his perspective, his passion, and the way that he took his business successes and transformed them into protecting landscapes for wildlife. He put it back into the land.

At the end of the day, conservation is all about the dirt. On a planet of well over eight billion people and growing every hour, wildlife has fewer and fewer places to live. Giving it a place to live takes money, takes capital, and I loved the way that Ted did that in a big way.

I met Ted through my friend Mike Finlay, a former superintendent at Yellowstone who, after a lifetime of public service with the national park system, went to work for Ted as the biodiversity director of the Turner Foundation after he retired. Through that role, Mike got to see remarkable places, meet extraordinary people, and do genuinely meaningful conservation work across Ted’s ranches and around the world.

I remember Mike telling me a story that still makes me smile. He went to Ted one day and said he thought they needed a website. Ted looked at him with that Southern drawl and said, “Mike, why do we need a website? We don’t need a website.” Mike said, “Ted, sit down with me for a minute.” So they sat down together and Mike started searching Ted Turner online, letting Ted see for himself what was out there: all of the misinformation, the mischaracterizations, the ideas people had about what Ted stood for and what he was trying to accomplish. After a few minutes of scrolling and reading much of the misaligned narratives, Ted looked over at Mike and said, “Mike, I think we need a website.” 

It did not take much to convince a man who had built one of the most powerful media empires in the world that he needed to take ownership of his own narrative.

One of my most personal connections to Ted came through a large commission I was creating for the Yellowstone Club—a life-size bison painting for the Warren Miller Lodge. To do it justice, I needed deep access to bison, real engagement with them in their natural environment. Ted generously opened the doors of his Flying D Ranch to me over several winter seasons so that I could study and research his bison herd firsthand.

What I discovered was remarkable. Bison are the ultimate winter survivors. They use that massive head like a snow shovel, sweeping down through deep drifts to reach the grass underneath. Their athletic ability allows them to move through snow that would slow or stop most other species entirely. Because of Ted’s generosity in giving me that access, I was able to create an entire series of paintings rooted in that experience. It made me understand bison on a completely different level, and it made me a far better artist.

The world lost a true conservation hero when Ted passed this past year, and the animals had no better friend than Ted Turner.