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About Gareth Putter

As a guide I led walks and game drives and lectured groups of schoolchildren about the bush. By twenty I was working in Big Five country, and at twenty-one I was running overland safari tours across Namibia, Botswana, Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The bush was never a job to me. It was the place I understood myself best.

I worked as a wildlife tattoo artist here in Hoedspruit for around 17 years under the name of Bundu Tattoo and along the way, founded Rocking For Rhinos, an NPO that held annual music festivals, auctions and activations in order to support rhino conservation initiatives, and later moved to Oman to manage a safari park for a member of the Omani royal family. Later moving back to South Africa with my wife and children I traded my tattoo machine for charcoal drawings to highlight the importance and beauty of South African wildlife.

But the drawing had been there all along. Turning to fine art wasn't a new beginning, it was a lifelong habit finally meeting the wildlife I'd spent twenty years living among. What I draw now, I have stood next to and tried to protect, and that is the difference you feel in the work.

I work almost entirely in charcoal, two ways. White charcoal on black Fabriano paper, my preferred surface, building the animal up out of the dark. Or black charcoal on white paper or canvas, clean and stark, when the form carries the whole story on its own. Either way it comes down to light, shadow and texture, with nothing to hide behind.

Now and then a piece calls for colour and depth, and then I'll reach for oil. But charcoal is where I live.

Every piece is available as an archival giclee print, produced on cotton rag paper or canvas with pigment inks rated to last generations. Limited editions are hand-numbered and signed. And if you want something that doesn't exist yet, my commission list is open.