The Tallahassee Crown 600TT

Jim Roche, The Tallahassee Crown 600TT, 2005, graphite and color pencil on paper, 35.75 x 64.5 inches.

JR: Often, I will draw things like escape routes and short cuts. I will show places where, if you didn’t want to go out to some of these very obscure areas out here, you cut through. When I first started these drawings, I had no idea that they would be for anyone other than myself and my motorcycle friends. That was it . . . and bicyclists. But the very first time we showed them in a museum setting, I noticed that people went to them and just stayed in front of them, especially when I showed these at SECCA in North Carolina (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem). There you had variety, multiple types of art; people came over and really studied some of these drawings.

JR: This is the Crown 600 T.T, but it does not extend up into the Flint River section. It’s one that puts together the Havana 100 Mile T.T, the Quincy 200, the Thomasville “Road Dice” 350 T.T. A lot of the fun is naming them. Of course there had to be a Silver Sliver. If you familiarize yourself with the names, you can run all of this with no maps. I know all of these roads, even today. It means that a person can go pick different slots. One weekend, you might run this, but, let’s say you run it two weekends in a row, word is out. You better not be back there too much. You might want to run this one next time. Give this one a breather, a little rest time over here. Then so forth, back to here, or run the contiguous route. I try to put in the towns. I try and show short cuts and on some of them I will write, as I did on here, about the basic-ness of it: two eyes, two hands, two legs, two wheels.