Three elephants move across the wall in step, and the horizontal arrangement is the whole idea. Safari Dance is drawn from a series of large decorated urns painted by Zinhle Nene which stand in the Ardmore museum, and the transfer from a curved vessel to a flat wall is what gives the composition its procession-like rhythm.
The drawing is fine and dense, each animal covered in small patterning the way an Ardmore vessel is covered, and the colourings have been deliberately restrained so that detail survives. Grounds are softly speckled rather than flat, which sets the figures forward and gives the paper a depth it would not have on a clean field. Elephants drawn at this size could easily turn sentimental, and the ornament is what prevents it: they are pattern before they are animals.
It hangs on a straight match with a 76.2 cm repeat, so the elephants align across the wall in true horizontal bands. That regularity is part of the effect and should be planned for: the band height in relation to a picture rail or a dado is worth setting out before hanging. In a hall, on a landing or in a dining room the procession gives a long wall a direction to travel in. Above a dado it reads almost as a carved frieze.
