‘Roads to Bells’ began on residency at Bells Creek in the Araluen Valley. I didn’t know it at the time but the seed had been planted about a month prior when I was driving back to Bermagui across the Braidwood plains. A huge black storm cloud was racing me on the Southern horizon, the sun setting in the rear view, making the fields gold, and as I reached the Clyde we collided, a great fog engulfing the car. Rain began to pelt down on the windshield and I had only the dimly lit edge of the road to guide me down the mountain. As I emerged at the sea and the clouds began to part, I remembered that the experience of clarity after blindness is what drives me to paint. It is the same mixture of exhilaration and fear. To do it is to not know exactly where I’m going, to trust that the process will reveal itself in time.

The Bells Creek studio is back the way I came that night, barely on the map. It’s hidden in the valley’s towering gums under the blanket of a secret garden of lichen and deciduous leaves. Everything seemed to perpetually glitter in winter dew, tiny flowers and dilapidated tree houses poking through the wild bush. The domestic interiors came out of my reverie for this place, of quiet observation in the safe cocoon of the patchwork cottage, drinking coffee at the kitchen table, sinking into the cracks in the wood, the steaming moonlit bathtub. With this scene around me I didn’t expect the road to become my subject, but driving back across the plains with two weeks painting ahead, the feeling of the fog returned. It lingered within me through the quiet days and dark nights, as the light moved across the paper, the sensation of going into unknown territory, into the valley and with my paints. As the pigment began to flow, the road appeared again and again, a recurring dream, blurred through the window, moving through the shifting light. The process culminated in the painting ‘Roads to Bells’, where past, present and future collide, the scene emerging like pieces of a puzzle, glimpses of the road I had taken, premonitions of the road ahead.

- Georgie Kite, 2024