A Platform for Painting

Art, like poetry, has the power to capture the essence and spiritual quality of its subjects, infusing every subject with a sense of wonder and deeper significance in exploring nature.

What I love most about watercolours is their translucent quality, which creates a luminous effect that makes colours appear to glow, unlike any other medium. Despite its reputation as a very difficult medium, I enjoy the excitement and unpredictability of watercolour painting. Often, it feels like the painting is going wrong until the very end, and you never know what you might end up with. I tend to add more detail as the painting progresses but generally stop when the painting tells me to.

Earlier this year, I was honoured to attend the opening of Angama Amboseli’s new Gallery, where my paintings are beautifully displayed on the walls. I even joined the official ribbon cutting — a woven ribbon made by the Maasai Mamas from the Weaving Studio.

Both Angama lodges have given me the perfect platform to create and paint — the Maasai Mara and Amboseli. One has towering Kilimanjaro views, while the other offers expansive plains full of wild animals. Being strongly linked to the Maasai people and their animist culture, beliefs, symbolism, outlook and connection to nature, trying to capture any of this on large sheets of watercolour paper and in my sketchbooks is truly an exciting immersion of creativity and painting.

Some moments last forever, and others fade almost as they happen, such as when I painted from the Out of Africa picnic site. I was perched on the rock with a band of mongooses eating the crumbs from possibly the most delicious picnic ever served — the picture really painted itself.

Or painting the sunrise from Angama Mara, and later that day painting from one of the roomiest safari vehicles I have ever travelled in (great space for sketching) with herds of elephants against the escarpment and moody skies, followed by two young zebras trying to cross the Mara River being followed by a truly huge yellow-green crocodile. Talk about tension!

I was working on a children’s book at the time, Pepper and Poncho, Adventures on the African Plains, so the crocodile was the ideal model as the book is set in the Maasai Mara. Pepper is my Dachshund, and Poncho is a sad elephant. The brown river gurgled past to the shrieks of different waterbirds and the shuffle and snuffle of warthogs (which I also love to draw).

My later trip to Angama Amboseli also provided stunning options. The vast mountain resting high in the sky, sunlight on the golden yellow Fever trees, and the giraffe wandering through the shadows — all so paintable. The final glory was painting Craig — one of the most magnificent elephants in the world, with his huge tusks, posing quietly and peacefully as he, too, browsed the landscape. I am now working on a large painting of him.