I am thinking of the act of driving when looking at these paintings but that is because of the personal experience that I am privileging and impressing upon the artwork. In fact, they are as an inaccurate and nebulous assessment as Manet’s Il bar delle Folies-Bergere is in relating the position of the viewer to the space between the painting on the wall and the tip of the viewer’s nose and that is not a bad thing at all. There is no car bonnet in these road paintings. Only some of the paintings suggest motion blur on the white line or the kerbside hedgerows and rails. We could actually be standing in the road looking into the horizon and waiting for a car to hit us from behind. There is something both frightening and liberating in this stance. It puts the viewer on a precipice. We are on a journey to a destination and it is fraught with danger and mortality everywhere we look. Let’s turn back and see what happens... Let’s go in the same direction as the paintings which means going in the same direction as Natalie; homeward. Back to the place it began. We will go away from the unfamiliar and back to the familiar, or rather the familiar but not as we once knew it because that is what home becomes when you leave it to travel under cloud-laden skies. Driving in the Same Direction We are going home. It is going to be a journey through the medium of paint and canvas. This time we will be following the route of the painter. There are puddles and strips of tarmac banding in the road that Natalie has dipped onto the canvas; some look like blood from a cut and others look like falling tears. The skies are not bright and sunny. They are overcast and by the time we reach the traffic lights near the town they are stormy. There are only three paintings in the series that allow us to turn off the road (although in one of these we have already made our choice and are moving past the turning). The painting of the traffic lights on the outskirts of the suburban sprawl is one of them. This means that the end of the journey is also a choice about which way to go to see what lies beyond. We can still detour from our journey home to seek new discoveries.
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