Art Wolfe One Of The Amazing People Around Here

Seattle and the Northwest continue to turn out some amazing people. This effusion amounts to no exaggeration - especially when you have just spent a couple of hours with Art Wolfe in his West Seattle home.

Art Wolfe, you see, is a wildlife photographer. He may be the world's best at his trade but, if somebody wants to say "one of the best," I am not looking for an argument.

In addition to being a world-class wildlife photographer, Art is a watercolor artist of exquisite ability. He is also a naturalist.

When he was in his teens he learned about plants and animals in West Seattle, specifically, but not exclusively, in Lincoln Park, Schmitz Park, Fenton Forest and other urban parks.

West Seattle itself is rather amazing; urban yet outdoors, with beaches and virgin trees, water everywhere, an incredible variety of birds and wildlife. There is a family of red foxes adjacent to the West Seattle golf course.

"I can't give you their Latin names," Art says, matter-of-factly, "but I can identify every creature, birds and mammals, you can see in West Seattle. I'm a self-educated naturalist."

He can say the same about several continents on earth, not to mention Alaska. To get a handle on this 41-year-old Seattle native, graduate of Sealth High and the UW, let's glance at his schedule for the next few weeks and months.

On Friday he left for Thailand, from there to Borneo. After Borneo he goes to the northern part of Japan. He comes back here in February to give a presentation and reception at the Paramount Theater.

That's on Feb. 6, one of many such presentations he gives all over the country. After that evening, Art takes off for Halifax, then Quebec, then Alaska. In March he heads for the Amazon Basin, then Chile, New Zealand and Australia.

He recently got back from East Africa where he photographed the famed mountain gorillas of Rwanda.

Much of his current winter-spring journeys involve a new book for the Sierra Club, "Endangered People," recording obscure tribes and aborigines who are just as much in danger, say, as the spotted owl.

In all, Art has produced nine books with 11 in the works. These are all coffee-table-size books with photographs that take your breath away. The other night I sat up studying one of his latest, "Bears, Their Life and Behavior."

This one sends chills up your spine; Art takes incredible, eye-contact chances - he has photographed bears from as close as 12 feet. "It's not so bad," he says, casually, "because I have a sense about dealing with animals,"

Still . . .

He was almost killed when attacked in a tree by a Great Horned Owl, which took a jaundiced view of what Art was doing with his 35-millimeter Nikon. He was once pinned to the ground by a curmudgeonly bull elk in Yellowstone.

He has jumped from a raft to an iceberg in Antarctica, generally thought to be dangerous operating procedure because icebergs can tip over.

He once lowered himself by rope over a cliff in Eastern Washington to get a shot of a very ticked-off mother owl with nine babies. And an adult mountain gorilla bumped him while he was photographing younger gorillas.

Does all this give you an idea of who and what this guy is? "When I get too old to travel and photograph then I'll do more watercolors," he says. In other words, a backup career.

There is more. Art Wolfe is a celebrity from Rome to Tokyo. He lives in a beautifully refurbished old house just north of Lincoln Park, overlooking a small ravine and Puget Sound.

His feeders attract all kinds of birds, including eagles. The well-fed squirrels outside his door are candidates for Jenny Craig. The walls of his light, airy home are decorated with some of his more celebrated pictures and watercolors.

On the ground floor his two assistants, Deirdre Skillman and Mel Calvan, field thousands of requests he gets for nature and animal pictures - from producers of calendars, magazine editors, book publishers, graphic designers, ad agencies . . . on and on.

When Art had to take a phone call, I counted 12 file cabinets, each with four drawers, containing an untold number of slides, categorized according to owls, gorillas, cats, wolves, whales, bears, etc. He has recorded the great forests and mountain ranges from Nepal to Alaska, the U.S., Mexico, South America, Africa and Europe.

How many photographs? Art has no idea. "If you told me I've made a million slides," he told one interviewer, "I wouldn't bat an eye. But then it could be only 500,000. Who knows?"

Who knows, indeed. All I can say is that his images, in addition to being masterpieces of shading, light, composition and artistic imagination, are unique in all the world. And I haven't even told you about his rock garden and running stream, centered by a 400-year-old Ponderosa Pine and created with 200 tons of granite quarried in the Cascades.

As I said in the beginning, we produce some amazing people around here.

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.