So I was not just motivated to explore and defend the fight of wildlife but I wanted to explore human sin, such as greed, ignorance, exploitation, contempt, violence and hypocrisy. 

 

The poachers greed and corruption is global, so I wanted to explore and discover anthropological experiences of cultural inheritance from all over the world, which frequently meant discovering an completely opposite view of human nature – a creative and more spiritual side.

 

Influenced by Asia, Africa, Polynesia and Aboriginal Australian art, I felt honoured to discover the qualities of respect, reverence, love, devotion and dignity in man’s co-existence with nature, depicted and experienced as ancestral inheritance that interacted with spirituality of the dead and the spiritual words of the living.

 

A true wilderness remains ancient and unforgiving.  Painting these landscapes urged me to want to paint its mammorial inhabitants, their food chain and environment in general.  This entailed understanding that wildlife had many human enemies, such as the poacher. Two rhinos are killed each day in South Africa alone.

There are 9 stages in the development of my wildlife paintings:

1 – People had to be disabused of the false appearance of domestication - making a pet from a wild animal.

2 – It followed that I began to depict the life or death reality of survival of such animals.

3 – Which led me to depict the hunger and desire in the eyes of a tiger, for example.

4 – That death was ever present.

5 – That lions, tigers, etc. have evolved violent and powerful tools to kill its prey.

6 – That humans are wildlife’s most dangerous threat.

7 – Where I began to see further animalistic qualities in people.

8 – That I was metaphorically painting fear in animals like the fear and panic seen in battle-hardened stock brokers in the credit crunch of 2007.

9 – I’m mindful that human dependency on computers and digital information on an international basis will be the new 3d wilderness, displacing in a virtual world the human need for wildlife to be protected.