Leopard Walk was painted by Punch Shabalala, among the longest-serving of Ardmore's artists, and its simplicity is the mark of a practised hand. Leopards walk in ranks, alternate rows facing opposite ways, and that single decision does most of the work: the reversal sets up a rhythm across the wall that a one-directional march would never achieve.
The tails carry the pattern. They are drawn curling and flicking rather than trailing, and their shapes were taken from the rhythms of Zulu dance and music, so the line running between the animals is as considered as the animals themselves. Everything else is stripped out. There is no landscape, no foliage, nothing but the figures and the ground they stand on.
At a 30.5 cm repeat on a 0.52 m roll the leopards are small, and the design behaves accordingly, reading as an all-over pattern rather than as a scene. That makes it far more usable than its subject suggests: it works in a cloakroom, along a corridor, on a stair, or in a room where something with wit is wanted but nothing that will shout. Plain paintwork and simple curtains are all the support it needs, and it will run up a stairwell without a break.
