Magazines which give space to house interiors often show dazzlingly clean-cut bathrooms. Fine, if that's what you want. One woman artist, however, will have none of this for her guest bathroom. She has painted every inch of the four walls up to the ceiling on a brilliant, yet relaxing, wild-life theme. The whole effect is of sand and mountain and forest and, everywhere, appropriate animal and bird life. You are entirely wrapped in it. The colours of the background are green and sandy blending into brown, into mist. Which makes taking a bath into a memorable journey around some of the wilder places of the world with the creatures which inhabit it. To your right, as you step into the bath is a mother giraffe, beside her rather gawky young offspring gazing into your eyes. As you lower yourself into the water, you are about level with a huge brown hippopotamus just rising out of a river, mouth wide open to another facing it, with similar grimace. On the back of the first is a small bird performing whatever service such birds do. Is it eating insects from the cracks in its skin? Very realistic. A duck swims unconcernedly by. Farther up the wall on the same side, various small groups of humped or horned creatures are seen in the distance. A lioness is just visible lying behind thick grasses. But facing you is the touching spectacle of a young leopard (can it be?) sprawled awkwardly across the branch of a tree, somehow looking uncomfortable. At the extreme left of this wall you are facing, a herd of elephants, seen crossing a river. Oddly, or perhaps pertinently, in this theme, is a bright Adam and Eve scene. He, left hand grasping an apple on the tree is, with his right, handing the fatal fruit to Eve, who kneels prettily on the grass, her fair hair bound in a pony-tail. There is no snake in this paradise.
All of this, remember, runs to ceiling level and nowhere is there a break. We have a watchful cheetah, a humming bird and a stoat-like creature robbing a tree nest. Underneath the towels and bathrobes are two vultures perched on cacti, watching a tortoise. They possibly plan to grab him, drop him from a height onto rocks, thus breaking the shell and eating the entrails. Somewhere there are these little animals, prairie dogs or meerkats, which sit up with saucy triangular ears. There is one space left. A bare branch reaching over the door is to have a sloth hanging down. No words can do justice to the whole. You are enveloped by the coloration and the animal figures into a new world, realistic but fanciful, entirely believable. Y