Oil on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

A teenage boy in the nude, driving an old car around his parents property on the Mornington Peninsula, sitting in the old car in the nude at the front gate, watching the traffic go past on the main road.
This is a scene from the David Francis novel, Agapanthus Road: 2001.
This scene, from Agapanthus Road, has always stuck in my mind, as a hormone wracked teenager, sitting on the beach on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, watching with longing the beautiful young rich kids, emerge from their beachfront mansions, watching their absolute self assurance as they strutted about in beach wear, yes, the rich are different from you and I.
Then seeing them trashing themselves at the Portsea and Sorrento Pub, so elegantly wasted at such a young age.
And such a beautiful backdrop, the rich rolling hills of Mornington Peninsula farmland, all horse agistments, patches of remnant coastal woodland, grey ochre smooth bark eucalypts, overlooked by the crags of Arthur’s Seat and Red Hill and further off, the mountains of Wilson’s Promontory.
The nude male in this painting is an 1870’s Muybridge copy, in the landscape in this painting it appears to be studio lighted, appropriate really, for a beautiful young, a poor little rich kid on the Mornington Peninsula.
Somewhere in the background to the left is the dark olive green of a clump of blackberry infestation.
Above the blackberry infestation is the treeline of mature tall Eucalypts, the eucalypt treeline of a coastal rail trail border.
Suddenly my painting is taking me back to the South Gippsland rail trail, a place of trauma 20- years ago.
It’s funny how I set out to paint something distant and ended up painting something close.