"The Chaser"

This leopard is not running. It is walking. And perhaps that is the most unsettling thing: this slow, calculated advance, eyes fixed on the objective — on us. In painting as on the ground, it is the approach phase that seizes you most. The final acceleration, you will not see it coming. It is now that you must decide.

The leopard's hunt does not resemble the cheetah's. No explosion of speed in open terrain — but patience, precision, a capacity to blend into the setting until the last instant. This painting was commissioned by a collector with a precise vision: to capture that before — the silent approach, the decision already made.

For the composition, I chose pure frontality. The leopard occupies the entire frame, at ground level, advancing straight towards the viewer. This symmetry is not an aesthetic effect — it serves a sensation: being face to face with it, without escape. The vertical format amplifies its stature, its physical presence in space.

The palette holds in few colours: the warm ochre of the dry bushveld grass, the white and black of the rosettes, the gold of the eyes. Oil paint, worked in the hyperrealist tradition, seeks here to render every hair, every spot, every reflection — and to make the viewer not a spectator, but prey.