Artist, marine biologist and conservationist Guy Harvey will be adding another award to his collection of accolades on 5 November when he receives the 2011 Simon Combes Conservation Award.
Harvey has been selected by the Artists for Conservation Foundation as the winner of this year’s award in recognition of a lifelong commitment to supporting conservation through art.
The award created in 2005 in memory of Simon Combes, a world renowned painter, author, instructor and dedicated conservationist. Combes was tragically killed by a charging Cape Buffalo, which had been wounded by poachers, while hiking near his home in Kenya in 2004.
In receiving this award, Harvey joins the likes of David Shepherd and Robert Bateman.
“The great significance in receiving this year’s Simon Combes Conservation Award is being included among other artists whose work I have admired over many years,” says Harvey. “We are living in times when artists can make important statements about the condition and over-exploitation of the natural world around us.”
Harvey will receive the award, a trophy design created by Peter Gray of South Africa, during the opening weekend of the 2011 Artists for Conservation Festival at Grouse Mountain, North Vancouver, Canada.
Founded in 1997, the Artists for Conservation Foundation is a non-profit, international juried organisation dedicated to the celebration and preservation of the natural world and is the world’s leading artist collective dedicated to the environment. The Foundation has a membership spanning five continents and nearly 30 countries. The AFC’s mission is to support wildlife and habitat conservation, biodiversity, sustainability and environmental education through art that celebrates our natural heritage.
In addition to his world famous drawings, paintings and murals of marine wildlife, Harvey is an underwater photographer, diver, angler and professor of marine biology. He is dedicated to helping protect endangered marine species and in 1999 set up the Guy Harvey Research Institute in collaboration with Nova Southeastern University’s Oceanographic Center.
In 2008, Harvey started the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to funding leading scientists as they develop new strategies for sensible fisheries management, and educators, who will create novel instructional programs to stimulate future scientists and new stewards of the marine environment.
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