Sports: There Will Be Blood

For Renan Ozturk, climbing and art are so tightly bound together that they are barely indistinguishable as individual pursuits. They fuel each other. They fuel him.

Ozturk is a professional climber, filmmaker and artist who is, most likely, at this exact moment hauled up in the Camp4Collective Studio in Salt Lake City working on his first feature-length film about ascending the Shark’s Fin on Meru in the Indian Himalaya. Ozturk has come to be a powerful artistic force in the climbing world and beyond. He’s been known to throw down canvass and brush in the middle of nowhere to capture the landscape in front of him.

In recent years, those visions have morphed into dynamic, beautiful films of wild, woolly places and hearty people. Hundreds of thousands of viewers live vicariously through his films online. He’s now been named one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year.

It’s well-earned recognition, especially after the past two years. Life has been a doozy for the man who calls Boulder his hometown.

In spring of 2011, Ozturk took a fall while skiing in Wyoming and suffered cranial and spinal fractures. Six months later, barely recovered, Ozturk, Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker took on Meru’s Sharks Fin, which until then had never been ascended. It nearly killed them, but it ended up being a film-worthy victory.

“It’s been the highest highs and lowest lows,” he said. “I had a ski accident where I went off a cliff and had four different injuries that 99 percent of people don’t come back from. I got really lucky. Then I started training for Meru in India, which is a pretty demanding expedition. It was the toughest trip of our lives.”

After that, Ozturk successfully completed the Tooth Traverse, a five-mile series of peaks in Alaska’s Ruth Gorge, and then traveled to Nepal for a time-lapse photography project. It must be exhausting to be Ozturk, but he’s driven and he’s driving hard.

Art and climbing go hand in hand. He carefully finds balance between the logistics of safely scaling mountains and the artistic eye to capture a story with his camera or brush.

“At heart, it’s a conscious (balance). I’ve spent so much time on the road with art and climbing going hand in hand,” he said. “When you are in the moment, you have that creative element built in. It’s always there. If something is happening, there is something driving me to capture it.”

What initially inspired Ozturk to begin making films was his visual art. It was an organic transition, he says, and he continues to weave his paintings and sketches into his cinematic creations.

“I still paint quite a bit. It’s blended into filmmaking,” he said. “I’ve spent more time filmmaking than painting over the last few years, but it helps to tell a richer story.”

When he’s on location, he motivates for sitting down and doing plein air painting to capture the moment. The setting and the story he’s hoping to tell help inspire his vibrant paintings. He’ll even use the earth below him.

“In one way, it’s the fact that the materials are often what I find around me. It’s a haphazard mix of mixed media,” he said. “You have to be scrappy with how you approach things. If you climb a mountain, you have to summon something within. I do the same with painting. That’s one of the ways my style has emerged. When you climb a mountain, you have a connection to it and that influences how you convey it and the final result.”

His artistic vision, Ozturk says, has also changed him as a climber.

“Not only is it that the people who are the strongest succeed, but it’s also the people who see the landscape different and who create good stories,” he said.

Ozturk calls his film style “fairly beginner.” With every film, he’s learned something new. With his feature-length film on Meru, which he hopes to premier at Sundance Film Festival, he’s still learning. The emotional expedition has now unfolded into an emotional artistic project. The story is one of obsession, pain and redemption.

“It means a lot to us because we will not ever have something else like that,” he said. “I think with documentaries, you have a full passion project. It’s not about being driven by someone or something in the industry. You have an opportunity to connect with the audience.”

It’s been a difficult process to tell a story that is so very close to him, but it’s definitely worth telling.

“In the early stages, when I was editing, there were times when I’d break down in tears, trying to make sense of it,” Ozturk said. “We’ve gotten an outside perspective, and then they get emotionally involved. And then we have to find another outside perspective. It’s powerful, and it gives it weight. You can’t let it effect the storytelling.”