Keith Shackleton, An Autobiography in Paintings (1998), p.87.
This painting of golden lion tamarins was included in Shackleton's An Autobiography in Paintings (1998), where he writes that it was comissioned as part of a set for the People's Trust for Endangered Species 1987 fundraising calendar. Describing the process of painting the tamarins, he writes:
'these were the most twitched-up frenetic animals I have ever met. They were never still for an instant. If they ever stopped leaping around it would be to have a scratch, and that so driven by urgency, the hand or foot involved became as blurred as a hummingbird's wing.
They were not the easiest of animals to draw, but occasionaly they would freeze for perhaps half a second, affording that fleeting image that finds its way into subliminal advertising. The pencil would scribble a few lines while a charged memory tried to do the rest.
In those frozen-frame stills they offered, it was the eyes that were all-powerful - little round ones like greasy boot-buttons. Their heads were close together, peering from different angles - in duplicate. I bagan to feel that a little more of this kind of appraisal and I would find myself up in the trees and doing the same'.