"Florida Safari no.2" is a more recent sequel to a "Florida Safari no.1" I painted much earlier in my career. While the first iteration in this series was based on the backroads outside St. Augustine, this painting is of the view of the marshlands crossing from Orange county to Brevard county on Hwy 50. I've said since I was a child that while the safari views you get in Africa are lions and zebras, the safari view you get in rural Florida is cows. When I was younger, sprawling pastures dotted with cows made up the entire view of the 528 heading into Orlando, as did a huge portion of Highway 50. In the many years that have passed, I've seen a train built next to the 528, houses overtake ranch land, and the cows disappear. The marshes are the one place I still get to see cows on the regular, since you can't build anything on them. This painting feels like my own version of Patrick D. Smith's novel "A Land Remembered", which tells the story of the diminishing of Central Florida's cattle ranching over the course of three generations and nearly a hundred years. It's a sad beauty to see these cows only left in our protected marshes, and a bittersweet memory to capture this particular moment at this particular time. I was driving to the town I grew up in from my Orlando apartment for one of the last times before I got married and moved across the country. I saw these beautiful marshes and grazing cattle from a road I'd driven a thousand times, knowing it would be one of the last times I'd drive it. My parents moved north, I'd moved west to the city (and soon much farther west), and I have no reason to drive home like this anymore. So, preserving this moment is the best I'll have of the drives from my childhood, and possibly even of the memory of Florida's ranch lands.