Collected Moments of Survival

The Distance Narrows Charcoal on Paper 60cm x 100cm There is a lot of space in Namibia. So much space that it can be difficult to describe. The landscape stretches away beneath enormous skies, and the animals can seem almost insignificant within it. When I made this drawing, I wanted to hold on to that feeling. But I didn't want to draw the landscape. Instead, I wanted to create it through the space around the animals. I deliberately allowed large areas of the paper to remain empty. Or perhaps empty isn't quite the right word. The space is the landscape. It is the sky. The distance. The vastness of the Namib-Naukluft. The zebras occupy only a small part of it, and yet their presence changes everything. I found myself thinking about how differently we experience distance when we are standing in a landscape like this. Something can be physically close and still feel impossibly far away. A herd can be visible across a valley, yet the space between us is enormous. And then, someti...

  There is a strange discipline involved in drawing a zebra. The animal appears to offer the artist everything. Every stripe seems to demand attention. Every change in tone appears to need recording. The surface of the body is filled with subtle variations of texture, light and shadow. And when the subject is Hartmann's mountain zebra, there is an almost irresistible temptation to try to capture it all. For a long time, I thought that was what drawing was about. Looking carefully. Recording accurately. Leaving nothing out. But years of observing these animals have gradually taught me something rather different. Sometimes the most important part of a drawing is what I choose not to put into it. The more time I spent with the zebras, the less interested I became in simply reproducing their stripes. The pattern that makes a zebra immediately recognisable can also become a distraction. It is possible to draw every stripe perfectly and still fail to capture the animal standing ...