Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/433799
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 5 9 Kenya and were joined by talented contemporaries from North America and England and included Bob Kuhn, Robert Bateman, Ken Bunn, and David Shepherd. Hacking had artist parents who also savored the outback, feeding their kids wild game and encouraging them to explore. "My mom and dad actually met in art school. My father was a painter of the African bush and local landscape scenes," he says. "Being around people who were buying art probably was the single greatest influence on my career. As a youngster I visited every David Shepherd exhibition and was captivated by his paintings." On family outings, driving along two-track routes that paralleled game trails, Hacking often sat on the hood of the vehicle and scouted for wildlife. In those days there were still prodigious numbers of elephant, rhino, and buffalo. "When I was young I remember sitting at the Great Zimbabwe ruins and listening to the lions roar as the mist drifted through the ruins. That was real Africa and it fired my imagination," Hacking says. A few years later he served in the South African army and was assigned to the country's war museum restoring and preserving artworks completed during World War II. He received a crash course in the nuances of abstract, with brushwork that focuses more on conveying a mood rather than every bit of detail, a technique now evident in his own work. Many of the paintings that flow out of his studio are landscapes with African creatures that give the works their sense of spatial scale. Take, for instance, his painting of indigenous Nguni cattle. The animals were originally brought to South Africa centuries ago when the Zulu, Xhosa, and Swazi tribes migrated south, Hacking explains. After European colonists arrived, the semi-wild bovines were ignored