On the first of May 2017, Margot and I packed our bikes onto a plane to Paris.
Then, breathing deeply of second-hand cigarette smoke, we put them together in a taxi rank at Charles de Gaulle airport and rode off on our adventure.
More than two months later, we packed the bikes in Barcelona for the trip home.
To see what happened in between – click on the photo essay below. In six parts, each links to the next:
Thanks to all who read and commented on “Figure in the Landscape”
The story is now finished: Draft version 1.0 created as PDF and epub
There were twenty two sessions originally published on the blog. There are 48 sessions in total.
I am very grateful for the feedback received and interest shown, and this has certainly helped shape the story. Writing the story and the doing the paintings together has been a very good experience.
I’ve decided not to publish more episodes as blog entries, as I don’t want to spoil the beginning by revealing the ending.
The curent plan is to produce a printed work to coincide with the exhibition of the paintings.
Cheers
Nixieland is a project I worked on in 2014. The idea was to build a nixie tube display and make a series of images from it.
I ended up making just one image, and exhibiting that in a group photographic exhibition “Light” organised by Atkins Technicolour as part of the Shimmer festival.
Here’s my artist statement:
“The orange glow of the Nixie tube recalls the atmosphere of the new atomic age, early space missions and the Cold War. These tubes were developed in the 1950s and used the glow of neon gas to create illuminated displays before the days of LEDs.
I love the quality of the light they produce – its colour and softness, but as well as this Nixes play to an increasing interest I have in the relationship between the digital and the analogue. These devices came at the cusp of the digital age – they used 19th century valve technology at the dawn of the age of solid-state electronics. In this work I seek to explore the nature of light and the ways it is recorded and transmitted to us.”
I always felt that this work was not complete – that it needed something else. The idea came to me that a video that showed the tubes in a more dynamic way would be the way to go. I attempted a very simple, low-fi rendering of a meandering nixie count- down. It counts down to what? The end of a performance for the Eurovision Song contest in the 1960s. When the world ends, it will be not with a bang, but with polite applause from a German audience for Vicki’s slightly doleful rendering of “L’amour est Bleu.”
A kind invitation from Unley Council sees some of my larger pieces displayed in the Council Chambers until the end of May 2015.
The biggest one, Osmond Creek, had been sitting in storage for a while. It was nice to see it out and about again after last being in some offices in the city.
Likewise, North of Red Rock Creek in the build recently returned to me after spending many years in a boardroom.
These paintings are all for sale if you have a big empty wall.
I also lease paintings into spaces whose owners need something for shorter or uncertain terms.
It’s not that great – well, actually it is.
Our organised cycling tour in Tuscany began in Lucca, where Margot and I had already spent a couple of days. It’s a beautiful medieval walled town, and a tourist town, so any walk through it means 30% of the people you see will be carrying a map, and probably one third again of those will be speaking a language other than Italian. But I’m one of those people, so they can’t all be bad.
The wall around Lucca is for me what made it stand out. It’s intact and in its current form dates from the fifteenth century. It is well utilised by the locals for promenading, bike riding, jogging, pashing, taking small dogs to poo on and similar Italian activities. Oh, and shooting replica military crossbows of course.
After an introductory loop on the first day, our second day’s ride took us through the towns of Montecari, Pesci, and Massa et Cozzie to the faded spa town of Montecantini Termi.
Perhaps the best way to describe the riding is to say it’s not all great. Parts of it are; the climbs to and through old hilltop villages, and the descents that follow are spectacular.
Of course, time has not stood still in Italy, and there are modern heavily trafficked roads that must form a part of routes from one destination to the next.
From Montecantini Termi we then did a lovely loop that took in a couple of nice cols and Leonardo’s home town of Vinci. On this day we were also treated to an exposure to the cycling culture in Italy. We covered part of the route for the World Road Champs of 2013, and we saw bunches of helemetless young guys zipping past, and small groups of old guys who looked like they’d been riding these roads all their lives.
My challenge was to get a decent pic; it’s hard to just grab a snap that does justice to the beauty of a spot or conveys the sense of space over a vista, and my primary concern was riding, not photographing.
There was one wet day in our trip. On Thursday it chundered down so we were forced to take taxis to the next town. Half of our group was mad enough to still want to ride – unsurprisingly the “it’s just a bit of water” Brits and a couple of colonials who would not be shown up by the Blighties. We got very wet but had a great time, and thanks to the careful attention of our guides we all made it home safely.
Our last day on the bikes was spectacular. We had our best climbing, ascending to 1000m from Castelnuovo di Garfagnana. The 450m 10% climb to our picnic lunch was remarkable, and perhaps the highlight of the tour. Fully satisfied with our efforts we were then able to enjoy swooping down some wonderful smooth fast roads to Gassano.
Our final day was given over to walking. We bussed in to Levanto the previous afternoon and spent one day seeing a bit of Cinque Terra. The peace of bike riding was brutally juxtaposed against the crush of these towns, even out of season, but it was nice to see what the fuss was about, and reinforced the supremacy of the bicycle as a way to see the countryside.
