'The Makgadikgadi region of Botswana is a land of vast grassy plains, seemingly endless salt flats and rocky granitic islands populated by some of the most interesting looking baobabs in Africa. There is dense bush here as well, and extensive mopane forests to the North of the plains but it is the baobabs which interested me the most. In my first year in Botswana (1978) I spent a few weeks in the Kanyu Flats area - mainly because of the strange, twisted and stunted looking baobabs that I found there. Over the next decade I learned a lot about the baobabs of this region and went to great lengths to track down some particularly interesting individuals that had historical connections with explorers such as Baines, Selous, Livingstone and Chapman. These travelers had measured many of these trees and also carved messages and their names on some of them. What intrigued me most of all was how wilderness, wildlife and look of this region had not changed since those characters had wandered through. My experience of the arid scenery, wilderness and weird baobabs of this region have inspired many of my paintings over the years. This baobab was one of the baobabs at the foot of the Escarpment on the Southern shore of Sua pan and has since died and disintegrated into wood chips. Extensive wildlife populations move through this whole area as they follow transient grazing and water through the seasons. There are no elephants here to strip the trees of their bark so when they die it's because of extreme old age or adverse climate change.'

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