A celebratory and very colourful painting partially based on the artist's commuter bike travel from Ashwood to SVRC in Donvale. The setting is the Gardiners Creek Reserve History Park, between Burwood Hwy and Highbury Rd. The park contains a number of public sculptures, including carved wood sculptures by Damian Curtain which use remnant Monterey Cypress tree stumps. The bike path snakes up through the scene from lower left to the top of the picture and the hill near Burwood Highway. A cyclist in yellow top peers ahead around a bend planted with pear trees in blossom and spies a young but clumsy couple of high school kids in a passionate embrace on a park bench. Both are bespectacled and fully involved in their kissing, oblivious to their surroundings. In the foreground, one of Damian Curtain’s sculptures of an older farmer and his wife and dog appear to be looking on with disapproval or perhaps just choosing to ignore such goings on. Other related sculptures crop up on the right of the picture and at the top of the hill. In the distance an Asian lady claps her hands rhythmically before a newly green poplar tree rising up into the top right corner of the painting. The hillside and land on both sides of the creek was the site of Melbourne’s first drive-in, built on original farming land, with the pine trees being grown to screen nearby residents from stray light from the movie projector. Some brightly painted metal sculptures of an old Holden and a drive in sign mark the site. The drive-in closed in the early 1980s.

SOLD

Private Collection