WIDE
OPEN
ROAD
2026

Opening 1pm, Saturday 14 November 2026
Open every weekend
10am to 4pm until Christmas
Online Sales  lelliott.com.au/wideopenroad

2 DESERTS - 4 ARTISTS
SAME PLACE - DIFFERENT EYES

In September 2026 four Daylesford artists drove north to spend ten days making work in two very different deserts. White Cliffs is an opal town of dugout homes and abandoned diggings, a harsh place of possibility where beauty has to be worked for. Lake Mungo holds sixty thousand years of human habitation, a spiritual presence that is vast and deep.


Julie Coyle, Chris Rigney, Peter Gandrabur and Michael Lelliott each sat in the same country and came home with something different: paintings and sculpture that trace the feeling of the land, the narrative underneath it and the vastness that always surprises. Same place, different eyes.

RIGNEY

Chris Rigney paints what is in front of him: portraits and self-portraits, still life, and the view from wherever he happens to be living. Now based in Daylesford, he has also worked from studios in Brunswick, Maldon and on the Greek island of Hydra, mainly in acrylic on canvas and paper. Wide Open Road 2026 took him somewhere new. At first White Cliffs seemed to him a place of sadness and despair, a catalogue of the different ways you can dig a ten metre hole. Then one afternoon, sitting on top of a sand hill at sunset, the desert flowers that bloom for only a few weeks after rain lit up and the place took on a whole new life. There is plenty of beauty in White Cliffs, he says, you just have to work a bit harder to find it. Instagram: @rigney.ar

COYLE

For Julie Coyle, a painting begins with a loose wash and a horizon line, and the rest is a mystery until it arrives. Working in charcoal and oil on multiple surfaces from Daylesford, she is driven by the feeling of a place rather than its detail, drawing the eye out to the edge of the land and giving the mind somewhere to rest. Her paintings are shaped by the moody, open landscapes of the region and the calm they bring. Wide Open Road 2026 was her first dedicated painting trip, sketching on country at White Cliffs and Lake Mungo, then bringing those studies home to become finished work. Instagram: @juliecoyleart

GRANDRABUR

A founding member of the Wide Open Road crew, Peter Gandrabur has been on every trip since the first in 2023. His process starts in a Daylesford cafe with a coffee and a drawing book, planning before the music goes on in the studio and the real work begins. A landscape painter by instinct, Peter found White Cliffs demanded something different. It is not a normal landscape. You walk across the tops of people’s houses, dogs call to each other in the distance, and your own shadow is often the only company. Rather than painting what was in front of him, he went looking for the narrative underneath: a wild west story of people who come with expensive machinery, dig for years, find nothing and leave everything behind. Instagram: @peter_gandrabur_art

LELLIOTT

Burn it with flame, dance, and lose yourself in the moment. That is how Michael Lelliott approaches a blank board, whether the moment is pain or the joy of possibility. Trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, he works from his studio at Sailors Falls on Dja Dja Wurrung country outside Daylesford, moving between painting, drawing, printmaking and steel sculpture, built on the idea that everything is connected. The work is shaped by desert immersions, motorcycle trips across dry country and days on his farm in the central highlands. In 2023 he founded Wide Open Road, an annual desert immersion in which a small group of artists make work in the same place, with different eyes. For 2026 the destinations were White Cliffs, with its raw human hope and pain, and Lake Mungo, with sixty thousand years of human habitation and a spiritual presence that is vast and deep. lelliott.com.au

Opening - Join us on Saturday 14 November 2026 1pm

Open - Weekends Sat & Sun 10am to 4pm until Xmas