The Sleeping Leopard

McDonald Hill: the SCICON painting, 6x12 feet, acrylic on canvas, 2004.

I hunted quail here with my grandad in the late 1950's, then learned later, at a higher elevation, I could not shoot deer.

Kids go to school here now in the summer. They are bussed up from the Central Valley to learn the ways of nature at SCICON, (The Tulare County School of Science and Conservation).

This painting commemorates the successful 1970's fund raising campaign to purchase McDonald Hill, and so generally save the school in it's natural aspects, and specifically save it from the encroachment of a proposed housing development.

I was walking past the painted rocks in the lower pasture at Battle Mountain Ranch when the call came from the SCICON board of directors that they were ready to start the painting. We'd been thinking about it for a year or more, the time gave me the chance to think the painting out totally, so I saw it all, and it took 5 weeks to make. It is the biggest canvas I've painted, and it was painted in the smallest studio.

Mitch Burrell saw a photograph of the painting and tagged it The Sleeping Leopard.