‘Dappled’

'Dappled', Ocelot painting Jeroen Verhoeff

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  An ocelot walks her daily walk in a Central American rainforest. She doesn’t make these walks purely for searching prey, but mainly to check if everything is still there as it was yesterday. That is because when she has to pursue prey at full speed in this dark forest, or if she has to flee in a hurry when she is seen as prey herself, she must be able to fully rely on her knowledge of her territory. Almost literally she must blindly know each and every fastest track there. For example, she cannot afford to sleep in for a couple of days, because without current knowledge of the landscape, she could spontaneously bump into a recently fallen palm leaf and thereby lose her chance for catching prey or escape. In this case this palm leaf clearly has been on her path for some time, but wait: what’s she hearing there up in that tree?
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  In this painting I not only wanted to show the incredible beauty of the ocelot but also how fantastically rich the rainforest is with its filtered light, its abundance of shadows, decay, growth, wealth and atmosphere. In the dark jungle, spots fall lightly on the spots on the ocelots fur and on the discolouring spots of the dying palm leaf.
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‘Dappled’
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Ocelot (Leopardus pardalis)
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125 x 60 cm – acrylic painting on panel – commissioned
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Jeroen Verhoeff, Wildlife Artist