“Pharaoh”
It was my first visit to PrideRock Wildlife Refuge, on
a Friday afternoon, in early September of 2007. After Carol and Gary
Holliman, the owners of the refuge, returned home from work, I go to
the refuge and drive in. When I get out of the car, there are lions roaring,
tigers grunting and a chorus of wolves howling. What an introduction
to a place that was going to be important to me and my life.
After we introduce ourselves, Gary offers to take me on a quick tour
of the refuge before dinner. After seeing a number of the tigers, lions
and some cougars, we come to the pen for a large African male lion named
Pharaoh. They have raised him since he was a kitten. Gary remarks that
the black-haired end of Pharaoh’s tail is missing because another
lion bit it off when he was young.
They get their animals from people who can no longer take care of them.
So Carol and Gary take them in and give them a home for the rest of their
lives. In the next pen is Cherokee which has somewhat of a typical story.
She is a cougar. Gary tells me that she was raised by a ranchman in south
Texas . He kept her in his ranch home, like a house cat, and she was
house-broken. This may explain why she only likes men and not women.
When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and would not be able to continue
to care for her, he arranged for her to come to PrideRock.
The next morning, after Gary tells me the “do’s and don’ts” for
visitors to the refuge, he lets me wonder through the refuge alone to
take pictures. One of the “don’ts”, for instance, is
that visitors are not permitted to wear sunglasses because all the animals
get nervous if they cannot see the visitors' eyes. Nearly all the tigers
wanted to come to the fence to smell and lick my hand and look at my
eyes. The lions and cougars were standoffish until they got to know me
better.
When I returned to the pen of Pharaoh, the African male lion, he came
to the fence to check me out. He is now a full grown African Lion, about
five years old, and he wanted to show me just how big he is. He came
to the fence, and reared up, putting his paws high up on the fence to
look down at me. I am over six feet tall and I was looking directly at
his belly. His shoulders were above my head, his huge head and mane higher
up and his paws on the fence were still higher up. His color is a yellow
tan and his mane is white, orange and black. He is very regal and can
strike a natural good pose for photographs such as the shot I took of
him that was used for this drawing.
Interested? Please sign up here!
I love to go to this place. To get the quality pictures
that I need to do my drawings and paintings takes a lot of time, patience
and anticipation of what is going to happen. Sometimes I may not take a
picture for hours and then suddenly one of the animals strikes a pose with
the right lighting and I am at the right angle to the animal. The window
of opportunity, when every thing is right, to get a great photograph is
generally very short. It generally is a few seconds and seldom is it over
a minute.
This upcoming week leading up to me having a booth in the big Bayou City Art
Festival in downtown Houston on Saturday and Sunday, October `18th and 19th,
will be a very busy week for me. First, The Houston Chronicle, in their Wednesday
issue, will publish an article on me, as an artist in the Bayou City Art Festival,
and my relationship with PrideRock Wildlife Refuge. Then on Friday, Channel 13
TV will interview me at 10 AM in my studio for their “Houston Live” program
to be aired at 4:40 PM that afternoon. At 7:30 PM on Friday night, my daughter,
Karen Duban, and I will start setting up the booth and hope to finish before
daylight the next morning before the first wave of visitors start arriving at
10 AM on Saturday morning. Please come and visit with us in our booth.
Cheers,
Acree
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