Meet Carel Brest Van Kempen

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Carel Brest Van Kempen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Carel, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome is a constant companion for me. I imagine it’s the same for most people who’ve reached a certain level of achievement in their field. It can be paralyzing, but it’s certainly not all bad. In fact, I’d be a little leery of anyone who’d never experienced the syndrome. It’s a result of being aware of your shortcomings, and being aware of them is the first step to improving them.
So I don’t worry about trying to overcome imposter syndrome, just to keep it out of the way of my getting work done. I figure I’ve jumped into the deep end of this career, and now that I’m here, it’s ridiculous not to give it my best and to work hard. When I’m feeling like an artistic nincompoop, I remind myself that the only way to improve my chops is to produce work of the highest quality I’m able, and to reach towards goals that may be beyond my grasp. When I hear that whiny little voice in my head say “Why bother? I’m never going to be any good?” I slap him silly and put him back in his cage.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

My two great passions in life are studying the natural world and drawing and painting. I’ve managed to make a career combining the two. I find that drawing imagined but plausible scenarios helps me better understand ecology in the same way that a graph helps illustrate a trend or a technical drawing helps an engineer visualize a machine she’s designing. Most of the paintings I’ve created fall into this category of illustrating an invented scenario that says something about the way the animals and/or plants depicted function within their environment. A second category is my more surrealistic work, which combines elements in ways meant to evoke thoughts or feelings, rather than portraying the real world. Other paintings are little more than jokes, meant only to bring a smile to the viewer. My paintings aren’t apt to make people care more about conserving nature, or to make them live in less impactful ways, but if I can make some people think a little more deeply and in new ways about nature, maybe I’ve done a bit of good.
My current project is a comprehensive field guide to the birds of Utah, illustrating and describing the 326 species that reside in or regularly pass the state. It’s a massive undertaking that’s turning out to be far more work than I’d imagined, but I’m having a great time with it and really learning a lot. I think it will also be a useful tool to help interested people study nature on their own.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Hmmm. I guess the first quality would have to be tenacity. A more pragmatic person would have gone out and gotten a proper job after a couple of years of trying and failing to make a living as an artist. Instead, I doubled down, moved into my van and started focusing even harder on painting. Hand in hand with that tenacity was a deep desire to paint, and to create a platform where I could continue to paint and not have to support it with a day job. During those early years my work found very little acceptance in the marketplace. That frustration was made very bearable by the fact that I loved what I was doing and finding satisfaction in building a body of work that I was proud of, even if not a lot of people shared my appreciation of it.

I may not have been pragmatic, but I think I was realistic. I made the decision to continue what may have seemed like a pipe dream, knowing full well that I might never succeed in making an income sufficient to get myself back under a roof. My decision was rash, and in some ways foolish, but I’m glad I made it. I’d be reluctant to recommend that a young person follow that same course today, and if they were determined to follow that path I’d tell them to be very sure to do it with their eyes open to the potential disaster that could lay ahead.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

The most impactful thing my parents did for me and my brother and sister was to expose us to a lot of different potential influences. We regularly attended a wide variety of events, from symphony performances to jazz, gamelan, Eastern European folk music, etc.–art exhibits of all kinds, foreign films…we went to the library every month and checked out whatever books we wanted to read over the next 30 days. We also lived in the country, where we were able to explore wilderness any time we wanted. This background really instilled in us an excitement for exploring our surroundings, both the physical world and the world of ideas.

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