The Road to Know Where
These two paintings are a pair, though they were not planned that way. They have ended up describing the two halves of the same journey: the uncertain step, and the arrival.
The Road to Know Where? is the crossroads. The path is chosen but the destination is not. I find that moment more honest than the comfortable version of decision-making people like to describe afterwards, where every choice looks deliberate in hindsight. At the time, it rarely is. You step off the safe ground because staying still has become its own kind of risk, not because you can see where the road goes.
The Road to Somewhere (Part One) is what waits at the other end, or at least what I want to wait at the other end. Abundant fruit, colour, a beautiful house at the end of the road. It is aspirational rather than documentary. The R62 gave me the bones of the composition, but the destination in the painting is better than the one in the photograph, because the photograph was never the point.
Together they are the same road, looked at from both directions. One painting does not know where it is going. The other has arrived somewhere worth arriving at. Neither is finished with the journey. The "Part One" in the title is not decorative. The road continues past the frame, in both paintings, in both directions.