This is a sketch for a larger work. Sitting in the bush, I noticed the buffalo skull on the wall – it’s one I’ve painted in the past – and felt inspired to tackle it again. This work is slightly distorted because I kept looking at the skull from different angles. In the larger planned work, I’ll be more disciplined about keeping it symmetrical, but for now I’ll leave this one to look a little more interesting.
The text in the red is a quote from William Cornwallis Harris’s treatise on the wildlife of southern Africa. Like most visitors of the time, his notes focus on killing. He was not fond of the buffalo, regarding it as a frightening, bad-tempered and savage beast.