Roadside, side road, Little Vic

We all have internal stories we tell our selves about our identities and one of mine relates to having always been a cyclist. So I love an opportunity to externalise and reinforce to myself, through the act of getting on a bicycle and going somewhere, this image I have of myself as “cyclist”. Thus, my internal cycling narrative is a personal journey which sometimes becomes an actual journey as it did this year on the Little Vic bike ride. A four-day trip around the Grampians. Not a long trip, but one that took me to the edge of my comfort zone. This was not because of the riding, or the company, I was in the company of good friends. It was because the Little Vic was a festival of the bike, accompanied by a couple of thousand other people, camping. Loving camping was not part of my personal narrative. The camping, with all those people, was in retrospect, fine. But on occasion, I did enjoy a reflective, meditative, calm, and peaceful moment, on closed-to-car sideroads, out of the head wind, by the roadside. That’s the moment and feeling that I’ve tried to capture in this painting.

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I am an artist who has run an e-bike business from home for the past 15 years while raising three children and loves most things about living in the “People’s Republic of O’connor” (Inner North, Canberra). I graduated with an MBA (Strategic Operations Management) from Charles Stuart University a long time ago and a BA in Visual Arts (Painting) from the Australian National University a very, very, long, long time ago.
There are a couple of underlying, reoccurring and interrelated themes that inform my art practice and bubble to the surface of my paintings (both implicitly or explicitly) from time to time.
The first of these themes is the idea of ‘desire lines’. In urban and transport planning ‘desire lines’ refer to the unofficial paths that collective feet make through the landscape over time. These well-trodden paths are both subversive, being illicit, and conversely, the path of least resistance. Desire Lines are paths that form themselves and are evidence of both humanity and the impact of humans in the environment.
Secondly, I use the landscape, and elements within the landscape, to explore what I’m thinking about ‘in the moment’. The moment (or muse) can include an emotion or idea, such as gratitude to a friend or joy in life’s journey.
Often, the inspiration for a painting, is a personal reaction to the zeitgeist and current bigger picture concerns.
A third related theme is an interest in, and love of exercise, and being outdoors.
Finally related to all of the above, it's impossible to paint landscapes, or places or people (in fact anything) without having some awareness in and reaction to climate change and our role in it, so as inferred above, this is also a frequently occurring theme throughout my paintings. I hope my paintings inspire others to actively explore the world around them, as well as their relationship to it.