Artwork of the Week - 14th July 2014

Carl Brenders - Bearly Asleep

Carl Brenders is an internationally acclaimed wildlife painter known for his detailed and lifelike paintings. His work has been published in numerous books and his work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide. 30 of the artists paintings were a part of the major retrospective exhibition Artistry in Nature: The Wildlife Paintings of Carl Brenders  which opened at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then travelled to Cleveland, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky and Shreveport, Louisiana.

Carl Brenders was born in 1937 near Antwerp where he still lives with his wife, Paula. He started drawing at a very early age and trained at the Fine Art Academy in Antwerp and later in Berchem. His work is collected by admirers around the world, in September 2002 he was deservedly honoured by the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, USA, as their Master Wildlife Artist, Carl described it as ‘the high point of my career’.

The wildlife images of Carl Brenders are first created from pencil sketches; from these sketches his mixed media paintings of watercolour and gouache are completed with a technique he has developed during the last 25 years. Bearly Asleep features a beautiful bear sleeping in his natural environment. Brenders' insistence on anatomical perfection in his paintings stems from his philosophy that nature, itself, is perfection: “That is why I paint the way I do with so much detail and so much realism — I want to capture that perfection," he says. Bearly Asleep is a Signed Limited Edition Print available from Union Art. All of Carl Brenders' Limited Edition Prints are signed by Carl and come with a certificate of authenticity, biography of the artist and a description of the artwork. View his full collection of beautiful prints here.