'This painting is of the very first leopard I saw on the Khwai River in Moremi National Park, Botswana. This was back in the day when Moremi was a wildlife reserve and not yet a national park. In the late 1970s which was when I arrived in Botswana - wildlife such as leopard and cheetah were very hard to find. They had not yet become acclimatised to vehicles so they were very hard to see. You could spend weeks driving around and never see one which was what happened with me. I heard their calls at night and sometimes found signs of cat spoor in the morning. So I was very gratified to eventually come across an actual leopard draped over a tree branch in the classic pose that visitors to East Africa were so used to seeing. On this occasion I would have been hard pressed to have missed it because the branch was directly over the track I was driving on. Bingo!'

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