Maybe it was 1963. My father Abraham (Abe) had an enclosure & pond created especially for ducks in our backyard in Johannesburg, now Gauteng, South Africa. At that time I did not understand that his family owned a farmhouse in the Pale of Settlement which they sold to escape the Pogroms, & buy safe passage to South Africa in 1922. Perhaps he was trying to recreate something of the “old country”. I remember being mortified that we had ducks & they flew around our fairly conservative neighbourhood. It certainly was not de rigueur, & I’m sure my mother would have very much resisted having ducks for long. This is the first of my ducks paintings for my DI ZUN & KATCHKES (ducks) exhibition. I was going to call the exhibition Zynshine & Katchkes (ducks), but had a change of mind. More that 60 years later those ducks have returned in paint.