Home? The plight of the displaced animal

by

0

In a future blog I’ll be giving a rundown on my trip to West Africa, especially when I have created some art from it. However, since West Africa isn’t exactly blessed with wildlife, being so full of people, I had to get my animal fix on the way back home at Frankfurt Zoo. Yes, I flew the long way home with a very complicated business class ticket created out of cheap points (just to make you jealous, flying business class all the way from Adelaide to Accra in Ghana (and back) and using the flash lounges in the various airports, cost less than an economy airfare by playing the game of using Star Alliance points and matching up the various airlines in the network. More of that another time).

In the Frankfurt Zoo I saw this orangutan and coupled with West Africa’s lack of wildlife (displaced, destroyed or eaten) and the orangutan’s own Indonesian issues with homeland being decimated to make way for our insatiable urge to produce palm oil, I created this protest piece.

Image

Sometimes you come to a point where you say “enough is enough”. That point came for me when all I saw of wildlife in West Africa were goats and lizards. I guess you can’t eat lizards and they are not going to hurt you, so they stay safe. Snakes and other reptiles are pretty much gone and goats are everywhere, destroying the soil. We did get to a national park but it was the end of the rainy season and the elephant grass was so tall that we didn’t see much. Having said that, it was still a great feeling to be there.

I have one funny story from that park. A river runs through it and with the recent rains, this river was impassable up until the day we tried. When we got to it, the level had dropped but the driver was still unsure of whether he could get through. He asked us to get out and wade across and he would follow in the Jeep. We told him “NO”!! So we drove across in the Jeep – fairly easily.

When we went to leave the park in the afternoon we arrived back at the river, and there, exactly where we were told to walk across – by a professional no less – was this! (You can see our old tyre tracks just beyond it). So there you go – trust your own instincts!

Image

On my way to Ghana, Togo and Benin

by

1

Long time no blog. I’ve been putting too many hours in at the office and haven’t blogged for a while so it’s time to remedy that. I’m writing this from the Singapore Airlines business class lounge – very swish – in Bangkok airport. I have a new trip planned to gather reference material for my art and, as I simply have to every now and then, I’m off back to Africa. This time it’s West Africa. I grew up in Africa and have re-visited many many times but I’ve never been to the west, so here’s to a new adventure. It’s a complicated route to get there; Adelaide – Singapore (one night) – Bangkok – Frankfurt (one night) – Accra in Ghana (and the same route back). The long trip is made all the more bearable because it’s business class all the way – I came across many Star Alliance points when special offers where being dished out and the dollar was in my favour so my luxury ticket has cost less than an economy fare. Don’t I feel clever (for once!).

I’m spending 21 days going through Ghana, Togo and Benin and I know I’ve got some very cool places to go to such as a village of 10,000 people who live in the middle of a lake on stilt houses, and another village of two story mud huts. Of course, wild animals are in my itinerary too and my camera is going to get a serious workout.

I’ll be back with a vengeance on this blog with new art and experiences, but for a while, I will definitely lose wi-fi. That’s the way an adventure should be!

What a difference a bit of water makes

by

2

Here’s a small fun piece I’m about to finish. It’s one of the many great sights you can see if you are a bush-walker. It will go with a few others and hopefully be framed together as a montage of curious kangaroos and wallabies.

Red Kangaroo 04 smaller

Right this minute in South Australia there has barely been any rain for a while yet in Queensland there are massive floods with tragic loss of life and unimaginable conditions for people to deal with. However, water can totally change what you might see as a bush-walker. The other day I went for a two hour walk in a fairly dry park. The plus, no one else was there; the minus, not a lot to see. Eventually, after not having taken a single photograph, I thought I’d head over to Morialta Falls. The minus, it was the Australia Day public holiday and there were guaranteed to be people everywhere. There were, but that’s because it’s an accessible and magnificent area. Though the falls had no water, there was still a small stream sitting (not really flowing) in the valley and this was enough to completely change my day, filling the place with wildlife.

After scoffing quite a few of the wild blackberries which were almost ripe (my favourite time – not quite ripe but almost) the very first things I saw were three tawny frogmouths. Now explain this to me……..I spent quite a while photographing them and being entranced (they aren’t a common sight and they are wacky and weirdly wonderful) and people could see me photographing these strange barky growth-like creatures but no one really bothered to look at them, and the only ones who did went “wow” and walked off after less than half a minute! Oh well, maybe I’m the weird one.

????????

????????

????????

Next on the list was this strange caterpillar. Anyone recognise it?

????????

Then a koala bear with its young

????????

????????

And after a whole host of fairy wrens and other lovelies, I spotted a goldfish in amongst a school of what looked like trout fingerlings. Curiouser and curiouser

????????

Bush-walking – what a great pastime! Especially for the wildlife artist.

Old Man of Borneo

by

1

I’ve finally completed a new piece. It’s a scratchboard that’s been a long time in the making with a busy life at the moment and a lot of detail in this. This should really be titled “Old Man of San Diego” because it’s from seeing one of the orangutans at San Diego Zoo in California when I was there last July. “Old Man of San Diego” just doesn’t have that ring to it since this is a male Bornean orangutan, the ones with the wide cheek flaps which show dominance to other males. In all the photographs I took of this awesome male, his eyes are not visible, too much in shadow, so I used some artistic licence to create a sad portrait. It’s one of those conundrums – we need to see primates like orangutans in zoos to highlight their plight in the wild, massive reduction in numbers due to hunting, the pet trade and loss of habitat through land exploitation, and one day maybe zoos will be the only place we will be able to see them, but of course we also don’t want to see them in zoos simply because they don’t belong there. It should also be noted that orangutans have particularly sad faces but that bears no relation to their mood. It is simply due to their facial muscles and as artists we tend to humanise animals too much, something I am guilty of but I do it for a reason – to make people stop and think.

12″ x 16″

Old Man of Borneo compressed

ISSA Virtual Exhibition, recent and upcoming shows

by

0

The International Society of Scratchboard Artists is having a Virtual Exhibition. This will be up for the rest of the year. I’ve had a look through at the standard of work and it’s superb – well worth checking it out. The are some amazing artists involved and it really makes me feel good to be a part of this.
Also, I’ll be delivering some work to Pulteney Grammar School for the upcoming ZOOSSA Creating for Conservation show which, as always, is in aid of the Painted Dog in southern Africa, a cause worth getting behind. Thanks again to Emma Still for organising this.

And finally, I had a table at RSL Villas, a nursing home, where I sold some work with a portion of the sales going back into the nursing home to help pay for some new chairs for the residents. It was a great day and I met some sensational staff. My awesome wife works there as a physiotherapist and everyone loves her and constantly tells me so!! Well, of course they do!