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Newfoundland, once a remote wilderness on the edge of the British Empire, may not have inspired many artists, but painter Rockwell Kent was lured by its chilly isolation. Indigo bays cut through rough shoulders of land, and icebergs set loose from Greenland would drift past weathered fishermen's cottages. In 1914, Kent moved his wife and three small children to this craggy coast to commit such bleak vistas to canvas.

It was the sort of journey that Kent — a famous painter, illustrator, and woodcut engraver who attended art school with Edward Hopper and once rivaled the enduring Norman Rockwell in popularity — often pursued in the name of life experience and creative inspiration. The restless Kent would later venture to other extreme locations such as Alaska, Greenland, and Tierra del Fuego to fuel his artistic muse.

But Newfoundland also offered a glimpse of Kent's downfall. At the time of his residency, the Canadian province was a part of the British Empire, which was at war with Germany. Kent, an admirer of the culture, sang German songs while he painted on the cliffs and encouraged the rumor that he was a German spy. After 16 months, he was expelled from the country. The incident triggered a new melancholy phase of his work but didn't stop Kent, a lifelong socialist, from supporting unpopular points of view. Yet after decades of fame, the Red Scare of the 1950s and the rise of abstract art ultimately pushed Kent out of the limelight. Today the once popular artist, who died in 1971, is remembered by a handful of art historians and a small but enthusiastic group of admirers.

And then there is Frederick Lewis. For the last 10 years, the Ohio University assistant professor of telecommunications has lived, breathed, and spent more than $50,000 of his savings documenting the life of Rockwell Kent. Fascinated by the artist's rise, fall, and zest for art and living, Lewis is determined to pull Kent out of obscurity. “It was an amazing life, and I wondered why no one had ever done anything on him and why no one had ever heard of him,” says Lewis, the writer, director, and producer of the new video documentary Rockwell Kent .

Uninspired by traditional documentaries on artists, which tend to focus on brush strokes and palettes, Lewis set out to create a film that would capture what he callsthe “force of nature” that was Rockwell Kent. As he examined Letters, photographs, and artwork that Kent had left as his legacy, one thing became clear: To truly document the peripatetic artist's life, Lewis would need to follow Kent's footsteps around the globe. “There is no question,” the filmmaker says, “that it turned into a personal odyssey of my own.”

A LIFE LESS ORDINARY

Rockwell Kent's artistic endeavors ranged from paintings and wood engravings to illustrations and best-selling books about his travels. The most successful and sought after American illustrator of the 1920s and 1930s, Kent gave visual life to a landmark edition of Moby Dick , as well as advertisements for clients such as Rolls Royce and Marcus Jewelers.

“The tendency of 20th century artists was to become more specialized, and Rockwell Kent was the exception to that — he was a Leonardo da Vinci figure in that he did a lot of things well,” says Henry Adams, a professor of American art at Case Western Reserve University who has published several articles about Kent's work.

After Kent, born in Tarrytown, New York, in 1882, attended art school, a mentor encouraged him to move to Monhegan Island, Maine, to paint the raw landscapes there. The artist developed a love for nature — especially the sea — that would be reflected in his work the rest of his life. His work as a lobsterman and carpenter also strengthened his understanding of the working class, which sparked his lifelong commitment to socialism. But Kent also craved adventure, and so moved his family to Newfoundland. After his ejection, he continued to seek new quests, including an eight-month stay on Fox Island in Alaska with his 9-year-old son.

Though Kent had achieved modest success with his vibrant paintings of Maine, the 1920 publication of his first book detailing his fascinating travels — Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Alaska — catapulted him to national recognition, Adams says. Kent followed it with illustrated tales about his journeys to Tierra del Fuego in 1924 and the first of three volumes about his exploits in Greenland in 1930.

“These books had huge appeal in the 1930s,” Adams says. “Most people were working at depressing jobs and dealing with a bad economy, and to read about Rockwell Kent going off to Greenland and having affairs with Eskimos was very exhilarating.” After 1935, however, Kent became more engrossed with political activism, Lewis says. He crusaded on behalf of striking workers at the Vermont Marble Company in 1936, an experience that ultimately led him to the presidency of the International Workers Order, an organization that was put out of business by the state of New York because of its communist ties.

Though Kent was never a member of the Communist Party, Senator Joseph McCarthy summoned him in 1953 as part of the politician's infamous witch-hunt for communist sympathizers. But the artist's biggest battle came when the government denied him a new passport to attend a peace conference in Russia. After a five-year legal struggle, Kent won a landmark lawsuit against the government in 1958 that cleared the way for Americans to travel abroad regardless of their political beliefs. Though he lost many commissions due to his outspoken activism, the Soviets awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, comparable to the Nobel Prize, in 1967, Lewis says. In his acceptance speech, Kent condemned the United States' intervention in Vietnam and donated $10,000 of the award to “the suffering women and children of Vietnam's Liberation Front.”

The Soviets also admired Kent's art during the Cold War era. In 1960 he donated more than 80 paintings and 800 drawings to the Pushkin and Hermitage museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg. (Today, however, the museums rarely exhibit most of his work, Lewis notes.) The State University of New York at Plattsburgh also has a prime selection of the late artist's work, which is housed in a gallery that bears his name.

Kent didn't fall out of public favor simply because of his politics, however, Adams says. He also was viewed as passé when he refused to embrace the radical modern art movement.

“Abstract expressionists in the 1950s left this realistic generation in the lurch,” he says. “All these figures who had great national reputations suddenly found that they were not considered important anymore.”

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IN SEARCH OF ROCKWELL KENT

It seems fitting that Lewis would discover Kent on the artist's home turf of Maine, while attending a 1989 video production workshop. Lewis, a former fiction writer who had entered the documentary film genre in 1986 with an Emmy-winning piece on the Boston Marathon, was initially attracted to Kent's striking wood engravings and early paintings of Monhegan Island, which he visited several times. He began to conduct research on the artist.

Though Kent had explored his own life in several illustrated books, Lewis was surprised that no one had made a film about the artist. Such work was starting to become familiar territory for Lewis, who was writing and directing a documentary about a reclusive painter who had purchased Kent's cottage on Monhegan. James Fitzgerald: A Painter's Journey , aired on PBS stations across the country in 1998.

Intrigued by Kent's story, Lewis worked on both artists' video documentaries simultaneously for several years. It wasn't hard to dig up archival material on Kent, who not only left behind autobiographies, but copies of thousands of letters, hundreds of photos of trips, and news clippings from The New York Times and Associated Press. “During his day he was a very famous man,” Lewis notes. “He knew how to get in the newspapers.”

Lewis was briefly sidetracked when he discovered that another filmmaker in Rhode Island was developing a film on Kent's life. Unable to step away from a project he was already invested in, he continued the pursuit by contacting Kent's family members. The artist's third wife, Sally, and three of his children were a bit guarded about participating at first, as the other filmmaker (who never completed the film) had taken what Lewis describes as a “tabloid” approach to tales of Kent's personal life. The artist had numerous affairs throughout his life and fathered an illegitimate child while married to his first wife.

Eventually the family relented, becoming part of the 18 interviews that Lewis recorded in total for the three-hour documentary. Though he acknowledges the artist's extramarital affairs in the video, he didn't want such material to overwhelm Kent's creative achievements. (The filmmaker covered Kent's penchant for pulling cruel pranks with similar restraint.) Family members seemed to forgive the long-ago dalliances. “They recognize what a remarkable person he was — flaws and all,” he says.

Even after gaining family members' confidence and access to archival material, Lewis knew that something was missing — actual footage of the extreme locales where Kent created some of his legendary work. Though not an adventurer by nature, Lewis knew that he needed to visit these places to make a better documentary.

“I wanted to bring the whole thing to life, or else it would have been a parade of paintings, black and white photos, and talking heads,” he recalls. “This created a more visually appealing piece.”

Lewis' international adventure started in Russia, where he hoped to gain access to the paintings Kent gave to the Soviet Union. He recalls that even though he had letters from the museums that vouched for his project, Russian customs agents eyed his bulky camera equipment with suspicion. Concerned that he would sell the gear on the black market, officials confiscated and held the equipment for two days. The filmmaker met with similar customs hassles on the way back to America, until his female interpreter broke into sobs and officials relented.

More adventure awaited Lewis as he continued to retrace Kent's steps. He visited Fox Island, Alaska; “Landfall,” Kent's home above the cliffs in Brigus, Newfoundland; and the isolated valley of Glenlough, Ireland, “where crumbling stone walls are all that remain of the one-room cottage Kent called home during the summer of 1926,” according to Lewis, whose project has been partially funded by the family foundation of renowned painter Andrew Wyeth.

One of the more complicated treks was Lewis' December 2002 journey to Tierra del Fuego, which entailed chartering a 56-foot sailboat through hurricanelike winds and restless waves to Bailey Island, a primitive place Kent had visited during his attempt to sail to Cape Horn. He and videographer Gregory Mansur, a professor at Texas Christian University, dragged camera equipment through brambles and icy bogs and climbed several mountains in search of the same view of Horn Island that Kent described in Voyaging , his book about his trip. Lewis was amazed that the indomitable Kent had reached the same location “in a small sloop equipped with a rusty, juryrigged engine held together by wire and putty.”

A decade of shoots for Rockwell Kent ended in summer 2003, with a trip to Greenland funded by an Ohio University Baker Award. Lewis and Mansur traveled by helicopter to Ubekendt Island, where Kent lived and painted during a pair of yearlong escapes. They slept on the floor of a schoolhouse built over the foundation of a one-room home Kent built in 1931. Lewis says these trips provided a refreshing counterpoint to the cloistered existence required for archival research and scriptwriting. “I was looking across the fjords at the same glaciers Kent painted,” he says.

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MILES OF VIDEOTAPE

Lewis returned home from his travels with more than 70 hours of videotape, facing the task of assembling it all into a feature-length tale of Kent's art and life. Christopher Reddick, who has edited the first of two 90-minute segments of the documentary and served as post-production supervisor, describes the aesthetic challenges: Of 60 gorgeous shots of Greenland, which best complement each other? “I come in as a second opinion on a lot of stuff,” says Reddick, a 2003 graduate of Ohio University's School of Telecommunications who is one of several of Lewis' students to participate in the project by editing, conducting research, or writing original music. “He puts a lot of trust in me to help make those calls.”

As he pulls the documentary together, Lewis is certain of what he doesn't want: the sort of dry, techniqueobsessed portraits of artists that can be prevalent in the genre. Fortunately, Kent's colorful history and his breathtaking artwork provide compelling raw material for the story.

Early viewers of the film have been captivated by Kent's tale. Lewis debuted the first 90 minutes this past June at the Lake Placid Film Festival, a prestigious event that attracts the likes of Martin Scorsese. The documentary drew a large audience, prompting festival organizers to schedule a second screening.

In addition to the festival circuit, Lewis has his sights on PBS. He's screened the first 90 minutes of the documentary for Phylis Geller, who has produced cultural programming at major public television stations in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. Familiar with Kent's work, Geller found the story compelling and praised the video as professional.

“For an independent producer to try to put together a multipart documentary of PBS quality is very difficult,” says Geller, who serves as a writer/director/producer for Norman Star Media. “It takes a lot of time, resources, money, and of course intelligence and talent to make something that can be competitive.”

THE FINAL CUT

In profiling the renaissance man that was Rockwell Kent, Lewis may have found a niche as a video biographer of American artists. He's completed principal videography for a documentary about the illustrator Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966), and has begun research on Kent's art school classmates Edward Hopper and Ohio native George Bellows.

“Many artists illustrate their lives, and I find that fascinating. If they've led an interesting life, there's usually some good material out there. I don't concentrate on the palette or the brushstrokes or the style — I deal with that, but I really try to tell the story behind the painting,” he says, noting that “a painting can stand alone, of course, but I like linking it to the person and the context and the times.”

Lewis hopes that his next projects won't be quite as arduous as the 10-year Rockwell Kent endeavor, however.His face grows weary when he considers some of the costs. Despite the grant support, Lewis found himself spending more than $50,000 of his own money to complete the project. Ironically, he sold his two prized Kent wood engravings to foot some of the bills. “I definitely want it to be done, as it's been a very long haul and has dominated my life,” he says.

The work on the documentary — which Lewis describes as a “quest” — has led to some unexpected and intriguing experiences, however. A long-time New England resident and Boston area native, he's surprised to be living in rural Ohio, but credits the move and the subsequent support from the university with pushing his filmmaking forward. Southeast Ohio isn't exactly the barren landscape that inspired Rockwell Kent, but here in this retreat of ragged green hills and sleepy coal mining towns, Lewis has developed a passion and a focus that even Kent could appreciate.

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