Roadside, side road, Little Vic

Roadside, sideroad, Little Vic, May 2022
Oil on plyboard
130cm x 60cm x 4cm
$400

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.