"Baboon Day, Leopard Night" Artwork

Leopards are dangerous at any time with their faultless stealth, superb weaponry and unlimited patience, and baboons will always be extremely wary of them. However, the baboons themselves can be formidable as a group. A troop are sometimes capable of defending themselves against a leopard to the point of making it retreat in haste. Daylight and numbers can give them confidence to confront a sole hunter, even one with the strength, teeth and claws of a leopard. It's a fine balance.

Then darkness changes things in the leopard's favour. Its night-vision is better and the night makes it harder for the troop to act as one.

This artwork shows a contrast in day and night for a troop of baboons. During the day they are spread out, active and relaxed. At night they settle down somewhere as inaccessible as they can reach and keep close to each other. This is the time for leopards and there are two of them in this composition. To me, the large growling one represents the fear of darkness, the other is reality on the prowl.

It is hard to imagine having to go through the nightly terror of being hunted as prey but there was a time in our history when that was the case just like it is with baboons. Trying to empathise with these baboons' bedtime fears was chilling enough for me.

There was a difficult balance in this picture's composition. Showing both day and night could be done with dark and light animals but composing them carefully for it to feel like different times of day rather than just perspective or distance was tricky. Keeping them separate, with the night baboons closely huddled was my answer. But then the other difficulty was fitting in the stalking leopard without it looking like it was already in touching distance of a baboon. It needed to have some physical distance from the primates it is stalking but not overlap with the others. It is very close to two young baboons but with the leopard looking down at the dark baboons below it works for me. It took a lot of fiddling to get this compositional balance and it may not be obvious but I am happy that it is there.

I think of this background of heavily weathered flaky paint as a rocky cliff face but it could also be branches. There seem to be elements of both, so perhaps lianas hanging down a cliff or maybe it's just an abstract hangout for baboons.

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