At home with: Seth Birchall

AFTER THE EXCERCISE, EVERYTHING’S GRAVY.

Being an artist for as long as I have and having to work... mainly work… and be an artist on the side, have the arts as the side thing, if that makes sense you have other things than the art. Now, it’s flipped around. Suddenly, I don’t have a thing I do outside of art. I go riding though.

The last trip would’ve been about 10 days ago.

My brother and I (I have a twin brother), we caught a train—the 6:15 out of central. AM. Which means I get on the 5:47am out of Summer Hill. We caught the train up to Wyong, near the Central Coast. We ride west of Wyong.

You head up a hill and then as soon as you reach the top...it’s very quick out of Wyoming. Eventually, you hit Wyoming Creek, and then up the Yarramalong Valley, heading Northwest.

You have a lot of hobby farms, but really nice properties.

We head west, go inland. Northwest, really. Directly from the train station, away from the beach side of things or Southern Hunter Valley. You do sort of recall the rolling hills before you’re into national park, fire trails and that sort of thing. Before long, more farms, more bush before you hit a main road. It leads to Laguna, which is a little locality out there. Then another national park.

Seth’s Itinerary. Google Maps, November 2021.

It’s 113kms, the whole thing. This time, it took 6 hours. That’s around 18km an hour. We still stop for lunch and lots of breaks. The maximum speed we would go is 60km/h on the descent, about 15km from the end, which only takes a minute and a half to ride down. At that stage, you just want to sit there for a minute because you’ve pedaled so far.

It’s a really good opportunity to have a yak with my brother, too. For 10 hours. Maybe at the end, it’s a bit like ‘Oh, I’ve talked enough’. Mostly though, it’s talking and riding. And we’re kind of on the same page, fitness wise. Every ride you go through, you kind of ride out of the station and you think, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do this. Do it’. Then there’s that first feeling of maybe not being as fit as I think I am. The watch says we’re only 3km in, we’ve got another 110 to go, I wonder if he’s feeling the same way. And then yeah, he’ll sort of look over and he’s like, oh, what are we doing? You have that look. So, you kind of bounce off each of other. I do not think, in any way, I would be able to do that by myself.

In my mind, making art then sitting on the couch or on the computer all day, is not what I want to do. It’s not my ideal sort of scenario. The effect of riding is that as soon as you are in that space, all that other stuff falls into perspective. Or maybe you even forget about it. Yeah. Without calling it meditation, I’ve always used exercise as a stabilizer, I guess.

I think I’ve got an eight-day period. If I don’t exercise in eight days…it’s a chemistry thing. Sometimes I get to that point, and think ‘what is wrong?’ It’s this itchy head thing, where I just can’t seem to... and the further out it gets, the harder it is to come back in. I try not to let it get that far.

Riding to the studio is great, I feel like after the exercise, everything’s gravy, if that makes sense.

There are beautiful moments that feed into the art, mental images. It’s such a cumulative thing because there are so many of those moments.

On another trip, before my brother had his first child. Before the first grandchild was born—so six, seven years ago—we went way down south, and I took a lot of photos and then made a lot of watercolours out of that trip. And then, as a result, I bounced back into the paintings—this was around 2015–16. I still have some of the watercolours.

In one, I would’ve been heading into town to get some beers on a grocery run in the morning, dividing up the beers among the four of our panniers. The camp spot that night was next to a little river. I remember the beers we picked up that morning because they were on the back of the bike all day; they were quite warm. I remember tying them in a bag and sitting them in the creek. Not for long enough, but enough to get them cool. It was this snowy river. This snowy little creek. I made a little painting of that. I think you’d have to know it’s a bag of beers, it’s kind of abstract.

Seth Birchall, 'Work in progress' (detail), 2022 oil on canvas 188 x 183cm. Photo: Leyla Stevens

I think that’s the idea, that it’s all supposed to feed back into the work. I’m not trying to find images, but colour combinations—and the images that I source for my work always remind me of something, of somewhere.

Exhibition: Seth Birchall, April 28 - May 14 2022