The African Paintings were born out of a trip to Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa in the fall of 1998. I treated the journey as I believed Hemingway would have, sans the hunting. In addition to keeping a journal, I did about four dozen watercolors, most of them quite a struggle to capture the rapidly changing atmosphere. The oils were done in the studio in Boulder immediately after the trip.

At one point in the journey, we were walking in no man's land from the border of Zimbabwe to the border of Botswana, the temperature was 105 degrees; and for that two hundred yards, there was no record that we were in any country on this planet.

Nor did we know how we were going to get to the Chobe National Park, some 40 kilometers east on the border of Botswana and Namibia. We caught a ride with a safari guide, Stephan, landed at Chobe Safari Lodge at the entrance to the park. The Chobe River is about 2 to 3 meters deep, and in places no more than 20 meters across; but it is a river that Tarzan would have thought twice about diving into...but that's
a whole other story...

 

_{"The trees are like Andre's pictures, " P.O.M. said. "It's simply beautiful. Look at that green. It's Masson. Why can't a good painter see this country?"}

_{-Earnest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa}