The Thousands

I rode my bike in the rain today. Yeh that rain – the torrential rain that is assaulting Adelaide right now. It was horrific. All my clothes got soaked, my shoes flooded and some corpulent bastard driving a 4WD honked his horn at me just for kicks. Somewhere along the ride though I had some kind of epiphany. Ok, it wasn’t really an epiphany, but rattling along on my precarious pushbike in a gale-force storm made me feel insignificant but in a good way. Large bodies of water tend to do that.

As well as being a painter, Christian Lock is a surfer. So I imagine he would be familiar with that horrifyingly romantic feeling of being overwhelmed by swathes of water. When I look at his deliciously glossy paintings I get a sense of the rhythm of the ocean and the way a painter’s body moves when they attempt to instinctively replicate that. I’m talking big, black shiny abstract paintings – swift, chaotic brush strokes and huge still areas of paint indicating hazy beings.

I know it’s raining a lot so I hope you have a car you can drive to this opening in. Because it wasn’t really that sublime riding my bike in a hurricane.