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A Second in Time
Ken Caringer's art mil take you to places where you've already been —or so it seems.

STORY BY GARY THOMAS
PHOTOS BY CHAS. J. DEES AND GARY THOMAS


This pair of pintails can be found on cards designed by Ken Caringer.

When Ken Caringer paints a picture, he does so twice. The first painting he composes in his head. He gets a feel for the subject he plans to paint, then carefully begins placing all the items that will go into the work—the setting, the trees, the wildlife. Once he has the composition, he chooses the angle and adds the lighting. Finally, after he has the painting complete in his mind, he does the second one—moving into his studio where he puts the work on paper for the rest of us to enjoy.

"Everything I do has to be authentic," he says. "It might be a little bit from here and a little bit from there, but it's always something taken from real life."

The paintings are so realistic you can almost hear the sounds of the swamp as you look at ducks flying out of a wetland, or hear the flutter of wings as quail burst from a meadow.

House finches (below) huddle together under a pine bough along a backyard fence in Caringer's painting "'Neath the Pines."

His subjects tend to be mostly outdoor things you'll see in nature—flowers, birds, landscapes, butterflies, insects. That's easily explained—the outdoors is where Ken Caringer likes to spend his time when he's not painting.

In fact, wildlife has always been a part of his life. Caringer grew up in Evansville, Indiana, the son of a well-known taxidermist.

"I spent my days exploring and collecting around the Wabash River," he said. "I was always bringing home small birds, snakes or anything else I discovered. I would get feathers from my dad's taxidermy business, and I learned to make quill pens. I used those pens when I was learning to draw."

Always interested in art, he also had a strong interest in medicine. In fact, when it was time for college, he couldn't make up his mind whether to become a doctor or an artist. Art won out, but he stayed close to medicine.

"I thought about combining the two loves and becoming a medical illustrator," Caringer said. "Instead, I have spent much of my adult life working in the medical field as a pharmaceutical representative. And I've been fortunate in that I can use my art in marketing."

But we're getting ahead of the

This drawing was inspired by a house that nested near the artist's studio



Ken Caringer sketches a bluebill from a photograph.

story. Caringer started college at the University of Evansville in Indiana and got sidetracked when Uncle Sam came calling during the Vietnam Conflict. Although trained as an infantryman, he served most of his tour of duty as an Army technical illustrator before returning to civilian life and finishing his education at Southern Illinois University. Before getting into pharmaceuticals, he taught 14 years at the high school and college levels and gave private art lessons.

Reita, Caringer's wife of 36 years, figured out pretty quickly that when her husband went into sort of a fog, stopped paying attention to things and began nibbling at his fingernails, that he was painting that first picture—the one he does in his mind. She knows that, in a matter of days, he'll move to the studio and begin painting. She and their two grown children have always been an integral part of his art.

"They're my greatest critics," Caringer said. "They can be hard on me, telling me what they like and don't like about a painting, and I have a great deal of respect for what they say."

A drake and hen mallard take flight in the flooded timber of Rend Lake in "Morning Flight."

If you would have asked him what kind of artist he was 10 to 15 years ago, he would have told you that he was primarily a water colorist. However, the 57-year-old artist has been working in oils much more and now does just as many oil paintings as watercolors each year.

"The public response to my oil paintings has been overwhelming," he said. "Oftentimes, I can sell an oil painting as quickly as I can complete it."

Not bad when you consider his oil paintings usually sell from $3,000 to $5,000 each. With those kinds of numbers, it's easy to see why he enjoys working in oils.

Caringer also is an outdoorsman. He grew up hunting just about everything that was in season, with waterfowl being his favorite. However, he doesn't get the opportunity to hunt as often as he used to. A bass boat parked in the driveway is an indication that he still gets on the water, though.

"I do love to fish," he said. "I fish for bass and bluegill mostly. I've always been into fly fishing and even tie my own flies."

That shouldn't come as a surprise. Fly tying is an art in itself.

Caringer has been a longtime supporter of Ducks Unlimited. A few years ago, he did a series of signed and numbered prints and donated them to be auctioned off at fund-raisers in Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky.

"I painted them, paid to have them printed, signed and numbered them and shipped them to DU," he said. "It was a gift—a donation to an organization that has worked to restore waterfowl and waterfowl hunting throughout the country."

Later, Caringer and his wife were invited to a DU banquet in appreciation of his gift. During the course of the evening. Dale Whitesell, then the executive director of DU, stood up to make a presentation.

"He started talking about an artist who had been very generous to DU," Caringer said. "I started looking around to see who they were talking

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A pair of mallards rest on Lake of Egypt in the painting "Sunrise."

about. It just never struck me that they would be honoring me. Finally my wife poked me and said that they wanted me to go up and get the award."

That award is now framed and hanging in a prominent place in his studio.

The three original paintings still are displayed in his house. "Skirting the Oaks" shows wood ducks flying through Oakwood Bottoms. "Home Free" features a quail scene he saw while driving on Boskydell Road south of Carbondale. "Morning Flight" features mallards lifting off the water at Rend Lake.

Categorizing Caringer is difficult, but he describes himself as being somewhere between an impressionist (such as Claude Monet) and a super realist (such as Andrew Wyeth).

A pair of northern bobwhite quail glide through the farm fields of Boskydell in "Home Free."

"I'm still evolving," he said. "But I think all good artists are always growing—always changing from one year to the next. I can see a difference in my work from five years ago. There's a new maturity in it.... Right now, I tend to be moving more toward impressionism."

I asked Caringer what trait or technique distinguishes his art from other painters. He said it might be his use of high contrast and back lighting. And while those traits are present in a lot of his work, they don't always show up. There is a definite versatility that allows him to move easily from landscapes to wildlife to wildflowers to medical illustrations.

Maybe his greatest trait should be what you don't notice at first—the subtle shadowing he includes, the detail of a small hinge on a door, the rich texture of bark on a tree—those little things that don't leap out of the painting at first glance, but that you'll notice after a week, a month or a year.

Caringer Art Studio

You can see Ken Caringer's paintings at the Illinois Artisan Shop near Rend Lake. Take exit 77 off Interstate 57 just north of Benton. His work also is on view at his home studio. Contact: Caringer Art Studio, 808 Melody Court, Hen-in, IL 62948, or call (618) 942-7849 from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

And, there's one other little trait in Caringer's paintings that he shared with me. He likes to hide images— usually religious ones—in his work. Then he just sits back and waits.

"It's kind of funny, but two years, four years or eight years later someone will call and say, 'you're never going to believe what I found in your painting,'" Caringer said. "I'll ask them what they discovered, and they'll tell me. Then they almost always ask I knew it was there."

And if you don't think he's good at hiding things, you need only to look at a piece of art on his living room wall titled "Pickin' Beans." He asked me to show him the bucket the woman is dropping the beans into. I couldn't find it. His wife finally pointed it out to me, and I wondered how I could have missed it. Two minutes later, I glanced back at the work and had to search for it again.

But the best aspect of Caringer's work undoubtedly is the realism of the depiction—his ability to put the viewer in the place he is painting for a split second.

"I was called an incurable romantic when I was in college," Caringer said. "And that's okay with me. I want my paintings to show emotion. I want people who look at my work to become involved in it. My art has something to say. There's a story that should evoke some sort of emotional response—a memorable split second is what I'm trying to capture."

Gary Thomas is the former editor of Outdoorlllinois.

18    Outdoorlllmois


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