A walk on the wild side and then dahn the river!

I've just had a story published in a magazine here in Taipei. Based on an actual encounter with a territorial wild boar in the mountains of Taiwan, it tells the tale of how two lost, hapless middle aged expats escaped a terrible ordeal by the skin of their teeth! I illustrated the story with two silk paper cuts.
The first cut called 'A walk on the wild side' shows the lost duo being pursued by the 'man eating' wild boar and fleeing for their lives!!


The second cut, 'Dahn (Down) the river' shows the two still lost, but making their way down a river as they know it will lead them to the ocean nearby. In hindsight it was the hidden dangers that could have caused more serious problems, especially snakes that like to hangout on river banks. Luckily it was a cool day so they were hiding. Search carefully and you'll see many hidden creepy crawlies lurking in both pictures.


As usual I cut the illustrations using red silk paper which was then mounted on white silk. Gold silk was added to the water in 'Dahn the river' to emphasise the turbulent flow. If you want to read the full story of this 'epic adventure' click here and you'll find my article on p18. Enjoy!

Oh, and before I forget... Happy New Year for 2009!

A Walk on the Wild Side

I found this article in a recent edition of the Taipei Times. One of the Taiwanese indigenous tribes has an annual celebration where the men go into the wild central mountains hunting wild boar. Here we have a group of young men with their glorious porky catch.

Quite coincidentally not so long ago I went walking with a friend on the north east coast. It's one of Taiwan's national parks. Rugged mountains with fantastic views of the Pacific ocean. It's challenging stuff especially for us pedestrian walkers. Anyway to cut a long story short we got lost and trapped on a very narrow overgrown path on a steep sided valley. We didn't realize we were in boar territory. As it turned out this was Mr Boar's path and he wasn't happy when he saw us. A big grunt, I mean a very BIG grunt alerted us to his presence and there he stood, blocking our only means of escape. He was mean looking, assertive and had the physique to back up his grunt...

...We realized that to escape we'd have to plunge down the valley side to the river below. Images of us being gored by a large pig kept the adrenalin flowing and we were into full flee mode. It must have looked quite funny to see two middle aged, white guys tumbling through the undergrowth in total disarray. Mr Boar didn't follow us, he had better things to do. Needless to say we survived our ordeal. I decided to write about our little adventure and to illustrate it with a silk paper cut for a local magazine. Here's the cut. I scanned it in two halves as it is quite big. I'll let you know when the article is published.