African elephant

"You know ... they say an elephant never forgets.

What they don't tell you is, you never forget an elephant."

- Actor Bill Murray

Watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - 12" x 8.5" unframed

With a height of just over 3 - 4m (measured at the shoulder), a length of between 6 to 7.5m (that's the length of an average motor car garage!) and weighing in at 6 tonnes, these mostly gentle giants of the African bush are highly intelligent with a strong sense of family and herd, and a complex social structure.

Here in Africa they are native to a wide variety of habitats including semi-desert scrub, open savannas and dense forest regions. Besides its greater size, it differs from the Asian elephant in having larger ears and tusks, a sloping forehead, and two “fingers” at the tip of its trunk, compared to only one in the Asian species.

From Alma's beautiful photograph "Time to Retreat" with her kind permission.

Framed prints, canvas prints, posters and greeting cards for sale on RedBubble

ITEM ID : AfricanElephantRetreat
PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa

Veld fire over the Mountains

"Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself."

~ Rachel Carson

W&N watercolours on Bockingford 300gsm, no sketching - 11" x 7.5" - unframed

Winter is looming and soon it'll be time to be cutting our fire-breaks again. Every Winter we have this veldfire (bush fire) phenomena, spectacular, yet devastating at the same time. Such a great loss in animal life, yet so necessary for the health of our ecology... Many of our plants will not flower until they have been ravaged by fire and many of the fires ARE naturally caused by lightning, but it is man's carelessness that causes fires in areas that are not ready for it yet that is the most heart-breaking.

This is a depiction of the fires raging over the hills of Magaliesburg and Tarlton (Gauteng, South Africa), where I live.

Framed Prints, mounted or Laminated and Canvas prints as well as Greeting cards and Postcards available on my RedBubble Site

ITEM ID : VeldfireMountains
PRICE - R350.00 including postage in S.A.

Unusual Winter in South Africa

Softly the evening came. The sun from the western horizon like a magician extended his golden want o'er the landscape; tinkling vapours arose; and sky and water and forest seemed all on fire at the touch, and melted and mingled together.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This was done from my imagination, no preliminary sketching - 
W&N watercolours on Arches 300gsm - 10" x 7" - unframed

A couple of years ago, in August 2006, South Africa was struck by an unusual phenomena, snow! It is something we rarely experience and it therefore always creates great excitement as well as hard-ship. Especially in the farming community, as livestock is always at risk because of the vast sizes of our farms and the large numbers of livestock we farm with - no barns really big enough to house all of them. No protection against the freezing temperatures and also a great problem with feed supplies. Luckily, people like us on smallholdings (8.5ha, which is 10 morgen or 21 acres), have fewer animals, making winter much more manageable, but still not worry-free.

ITEM ID : UnusualWinter
PRICE - R350.00 including postage IN SOUTH AFRICA

Why the environment has to be preserved

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.

- Bill Bradley

Done from my imagination, no preliminary sketching - W&N watercolours on Bockingford 300gsm - 12" x 8" - unframed

We're still having a lot of rain here in Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa, and my palette is definitely being affected by this - I'm drawn to all the wet and cool colours as we haven't being seeing much of the sun at all. Our dams are filled to capacity, rivers are swollen and causing flooding and, of course, the gardens are smiling!

I'm not sure whether us humans are all to blame for 'global warming' and the strange weather patterns, because Mother Earth has her own natural cycles of warming and freezing, but the mess that us humans make on this planet is of major concern to me. Isn't a beautiful landscape enough incentive for each and every one of us to take responsibility for our mess in order to preserve it....?

ITEM ID : EnvironmentPreserved
PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa

A Farmhouse somewhere in the Karoo

I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.

- Ella Maillart

W&N watercolours on Bockingford 300gsm - 12" x 8"

'n Plaashuisie êrens in die Karoo.

The Karoo (a Khoisan word of uncertain etymology) is a semi-desert region of South Africa. It has two main sub-regions - the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south.
The Great Karoo has an area of more than 400,000 square kilometers. From a geological point of view it has been a vast inland basin for most of the past 250 million years. At one stage the area was glaciated and the evidence for this is found in the widely-distributed Dwyka tillite. Later, at various times, there were great inland deltas, seas, lakes or swamps. Enormous deposits of coal formed and these are one of the pillars of the economy of South Africa today. Volcanic activity took place on a titanic scale. Despite this baptism of fire, ancient reptiles and amphibians prospered in the wet forests and their remains have made the Karoo famous amongst palaeontologists.

Western people first settled in the Cape in 1652, but made almost no inroads into the Karoo prior to about 1800. Before that time, large herds of antelope, zebra and other large game roamed the grassy flats of the region. The Khoi and Bushmen, last of the southern African Stone Age peoples, wandered far and wide. There were no Europeans and no Africans of Bantu extraction.
Info from "Wikipedia":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoo>

ITEM ID : FarmhouseKaroo
PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa