(Click on the images to enlarge the illustrations)
I first met Jane Goodall at Heathrow airport with the publisher Michael Neugebauer. Michael had already published The Chimpanzee Family Book with Jane; had been to The Gombe National Park in Tanzania to photograph the chimps, and was already a supporter of Jane’s charity, the JGI. The possibility of my working with her came up and I was asked if I could draw chimpanzees. I’d never drawn one and perhaps I could have replied, “Yes, but I will need to see them in their natural habitat”. Being freelance, I simply said, “Yes, of course”. Jane and Michael flew off to separate and exotic parts of the world and I drove back home to my drawing board. It isn’t just the freelance thing though; I assume that I can draw anything because drawing is a process of discovery; and a good way to learn about an animal, for example, is to draw it. As well as doing various pieces for the JGI, I have since worked with Jane on With Love a book of true stories about the lives of chimps and Rickie and Henri, again, a true story about the relationship between an orphaned chimp and a dog.
Possibly as a result of this, I was asked by BBC Wildlife Magazine to meet with Debbie Martyr, a journalist who was searching for (and reckoned she had seen) orang pendek, a mythical, human-like Sumatran primate. I don’t think the drawing I made from her description was very good, but, for a while at least, it must have been the only drawing of orang pendek. Every now and then I would get a call asking for use of the artwork and it was published several times, in different magazines, around the world. I believe a version was also exhibited in the Natural History Museum in London.
Around this time I also illustrated an article about chimp behaviour in National Geographic Magazine, (the most I have ever been paid for 3 days work), and did information boards about apes: chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans and gibbons, for Los Angeles Zoo. I had become an ape-man.
