'What made the Ngwezumba in Botswana so special was that you could stay here for months at a time and never see another vehicle or tire tracks other than your own. The noise during the nights leading up to the full moon was truly amazing - trumpeting elephants, hyena and lions calling from every point of the compass. In the first couple of weeks I slept next to the vehicle on a camp bed with the fire at my head. I spent the nights staring up at the stars or the moon and listening to the calls of lions in the distance. In retrospect that might now seem to be incredibly risky behavior, but at the time I hardly gave it a thought. Eventually, I decided I should sleep under the canvas tarpaulin in the open back of the Landcruiser - if only to get a good night’s sleep, rather than for any safety reasons. What really did concern me in the Ngwezumba was a mechanical breakdown. My vehicle then was a 1969 Landcruiser pickup, carefully maintained by me, but when dealing with ten-year old machinery breakdowns are always a possibility. Water, and where to get it, was another source of concern solved by collecting it from riverbed pools, straining out the inevitable bits of elephant dung using a towel. The milky fluid that resulted was boiled in a kettle over a fire. My kettle was stolen several times by playful lions when I forgot to bring it in at night. They would bat it about like kittens and in the morning I would have to go looking for it in the bushes nearby. By the time I left a month later the kettle was a patchwork of soldered repairs, where their incisors had repeatedly punctured the metal. The one animal which really defined Ngwezumba were its lions. They were the most aggressive lions I have ever encountered, maybe because they had never been hunted, and at that time they had not yet become habituated to humans or vehicles. These indivisuals were the inspiration for most of the lion paintings that I have done during the course of the last three decades. This painting is my salute to those magnificent Ngwezumba lions.'

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