Beyond the Last Glance

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There is something about watching a wild animal move away from you that I find unexpectedly poignant.

Perhaps it is because, as an observer, I am always aware that the encounter is temporary. I may have been sitting quietly for hours, watching the herd move around me, and then suddenly one animal turns and begins to walk away. There is an almost instinctive feeling that it might disappear forever.

But of course, that is my story — not theirs.

For the zebra, there is no sense of departure. Nothing has ended. It is simply moving on.

It may be going towards water, back towards the herd, towards food, towards shelter. It may be responding to something I cannot see or hear. Whatever the reason, its life continues beyond the point at which I can see it.

That distinction stayed with me when I made this drawing.

I deliberately allowed much of the animal to disappear into the white space. There is enough of the body for us to understand that it is moving away, but there is no landscape to contain it and no destination to tell us where it is going. The zebra simply moves beyond our view.

And perhaps that is what the title Beyond the Last Glance means to me.

There is a tendency, particularly when we observe wildlife, to think in terms of the moment we can see. We photograph the animal when it appears, we watch it while it remains within our field of vision, and when it disappears we instinctively experience that as an ending.

But the animal does not experience the edge of our vision as an ending.

Beyond the last glance, it continues.

That thought has become increasingly important to me as this collection has developed. These drawings are, after all, only fragments of lives that continue whether I am there to witness them or not. Each image is a moment that I have managed to hold onto, but the life itself cannot be held.

Perhaps that is the paradox of observing wild animals: we are constantly trying to preserve moments that belong to something that is always moving beyond them.

The zebra leaves the frame.

And somewhere beyond my last glance, it carries on.


See more of the Collected Moments of Survival images here 

or read all about Collected Moments of Survival here

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