'Mogohelo: The Hunter Painting
My favourite part of the Okavango is the Chitabe area, which lies just to the south of the Moremi National Park in Botswana, an easy drive from Maun. It was a place that I regularly used to stop over on journeys up to the Chobe, or Savuti. Over a period of 10 years I must have camped there at least a hundred times. The flood plains at this point are at the very maximum extent of the Okavango flood line. However, sometimes in bad years these flood plains do not flood at all and are devoid of wildlife. But when they do flood, the numbers of buffalo that frequent this area is truly spectacular. Because of this, lions are common and the interaction between these two species is dynamic and often electric. These two paintings are different views of just such an interaction, on the flood plain in front of where I usually camped. This was a small palm-scrub island surrounded by a vast green plain grazed flat by thousands of lechwe and buffalo. Because I usually stayed here overnight en route to somewhere else, I would arrive late in the afternoon when the light was low, and the temperatures cool. My memories of this place are of long shadows, warm light and abundant wildlife coming out onto the plains to feed at night. This painting is one of a series of three based on an afternoon I experienced in 1979 in the Chitabe area.'

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