Ivory Burn Kenya
This page is dedicated to all the elephants that have died in the hands of poachers. Kenya today will burn tonnes of ivory, making a powerful statement that these animals are worth more alive than dead.
'The African Bull Elephant' is a painting that is dedicated to a creature of pure magnificence, he is a dinosaur from an old age and yet a living mammoth of the new age. The African Bull Elephant roams the savannah lands, elephants enjoy rolling in the wet mud to cool and sooth their skins. In the picture, the earth is drying and a cloudless sky depicts a need for rain, perhaps insinuating climate change.
Those who have studied elephants know that they are highly intelligent creatures, with long memories and like us they mourn their dead.
For the artist, painting such a creature was as much about bringing through its personality and way of life, as showing its enormous splendour. Every elephant is unique, just like people, they have different personalities and mannerisms. To bring him to life, his anatomy had to be studied from the texture & thickness of his skin, how it varies on different parts of his body, to its colouration. There is a multitude of grey and brown hues, as his skin takes on the colours of his natural environment. Texture is created as the brush strokes make an illusion of undulation, within the skin and shadow is used to enhance his muscular form.
The marks on his tusks show his history, his age and the challenges he has had to endure, in his life for a territory and mate. They serve an important purpose for the elephant, but are also the reason for their demise. Today we have reached extreme proportions, where in a fight to save this beautiful animal, we are resorting to the burning of their tusks. It is a sad reflection of how many elephants have been slaughtered, but the message being conveyed is that we value our Elephants not ivory for profit.
We should all support the African people in protecting these animals; as the African Elephant is found no where else in the World living wild, but Africa. We should not allow them to become extinct. Each individual animal species has a role to play in a universal ecosystem. If we lose our elephants, we lose more of that balance in the ecosystem and this in the long-term affects us and our children, not just our majestic African Elephants.