"Last Warning"

The buffalo does not have the look of a bovine. Every one I have ever observed had its own character, its own features, its own personality — some are handsome, others less so. But what unites them is that intensity in the eyes, a gaze that sizes you up and judges you from on high, almost human in its hardness. When Robert Ruark wrote that the buffalo 'looks at you as if you owe him money', he found the exact words for what anyone feels who has encountered that gaze.

'Last Warning' — the final warning. This big male is fixing you, evaluating you. Charge or not? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is precisely this uncertainty that makes the animal so fascinating and so feared. I wanted to paint a buffalo with a real personality — a face whose intensity pierces through, not a generic animal. To illustrate Ruark's phrase through a painting, to render that feeling one has when a buffalo judges you with its eyes.

The panoramic format imposed itself naturally: the horns had to occupy all the space, to overflow the frame almost. The palette is cool — blues, greys, broken whites — to render the particular light of the savanna in broad daylight, and to concentrate all the tension of the painting in the single gaze of the animal. In the background, a second buffalo barely sketched in recalls that this male is not alone.

The gaze is always the starting point of my paintings. It is what hooks, questions, creates the bond between the animal and the one who looks. With Last Warning, I wanted that bond to be uncomfortable — for the viewer to feel, even for a moment, what a man feels facing a buffalo that has made up its mind.