In the Shadow of Your Wings: A Contemporary Bicycle Painting About Freedom, Faith, and Motherhood

The highlights of my childhood usually involve a bicycle. In one of my favorites, my dad has just taken up jogging, and I am pedaling beside him while he listens to the Saints game on his radio walkman. He pumps his fist when they score a touchdown (so very rare) and we go faster with enthusiasm. 

In another, my best friend and I take off riding on the Tammany Trace without a plan other than avoiding those huge black grasshoppers on the path. We end up the next town over at my Great Aunt’s carmelite community where we stop to visit. She gives us snacks and water in her little art studio among the trees. 

I’m not sure when I stopped riding, but I do know that in my early 20s when I wasn’t quite sure how to transition fully into adulthood, I needed a bicycle. I used my college graduation money to buy one; the joy returned instantly.

A bicycle and a ticket back to childhood

That summer, back home before graduate school began, I spent hours riding the same streets where I’d first lost my training wheels. It turned out I had purchased more than a bicycle. Somehow, I had bought a ticket back to childhood—complimentary wind through the hair included. Neighbors who’d known me since diapers would say things like “I saw you riding your bike the other day. You looked so happy.”  And I was. 

Maybe, I thought then, growing up was something you could slowly pedal your way into being ready for. I wonder if most people experience adulthood as an unwanted and unexpected surprise?

Freedom, independence, and my mother

It seemed to take me more time than the peers around me, but eventually I found my way from aimless naïveté into what everyone always seemed to be calling “the real world.” I got a job, got married, had a child, got a divorce, eventually remarried, all the while watching my brilliant mom slowly lose her eyesight.

By the time my son was three, she couldn’t drive anymore. And with that, so went her independence.

She had resources galore—my dad and friends would happily take her anywhere she needed to go—but having to ask, coordinate, and plan just to get groceries was a real loss of freedom, one I don’t think any of us fully appreciated.

A few years ago, my mom walked into my gallery and became emotional standing in front of one of my bicycle paintings. She had been riding an e-bike around her neighborhood for some time—not far, but far enough. To the gym. To grandchildren’s bus stops. To small destinations she could reach on her own.

“It reminds me of my freedom,” she said quietly.

Mine too, I thought.

I can’t see a bicycle now without thinking about freedom and all those dates I’d had with the wind where my mind would finally go quiet enough for my senses to come to life and make any worries feel frivolous and unimportant

The story behind Shadow of Your Wings

This new oil painting is part of what I’ve come to think of as my “Bicycle Collection.”

I’ve titled it Shadow of Your Wings, inspired by Psalm 17:8:

“Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.”

Lately, I’ve been reading the Psalms most mornings, and although it’s often overlooked, I’m struck by how often scripture depicts God’s love in maternal, even avian imagery—sheltering, gathering, carrying.

The pelicans that once kept me company during a lonely season after my divorce have found their way into this painting too, quietly soaring above the rider. Pelicans have become recurring symbols in my work, often representing protection, grace, home, and freedom.

When I think about my mother, I think about that kind of love: constant, protective, expansive enough to hold both grief and joy at once. Seeing God described in similarly tender ways has steadied something in my own shaky faith.

Held and free

I recently heard someone say that as we age, we do not stop being the ages we once were—we simply add to them.

So I am still ten years old, hoping that if I pedal fast enough, the Saints might actually win. I’m twenty-four wondering how in the world I’ll figure anything out. I am thirty-two watching pelicans on my porch, hoping their agency will give me some of my own. Soon I’ll add forty-five to the list too.

And I suspect I’ll still be painting, because painting is the only thing that now gives me the same feeling bicycling once did: freedom.

How comforting to think that no matter where the path leads, we remain held in the shadow of something larger than ourselves. How wonderful to discover that freedom can still exist, even after we lose certain kinds of vision– our actual eyesight or the way we think the world should operate, our fear that we don’t quite belong or can’t get to where we’re going. 

How hopeful to be both held and free. How joyful to ride a bike.

Artist Note

Shadow of Your Wings is a contemporary oil on canvas bicycle painting inspired by freedom, memory, motherhood, and faith. Part of Denise Hopkins’ ongoing Bicycle Collection, the painting explores themes of independence, protection, and grace through recurring imagery of bicycles, pelicans, and the coastal Southern landscape.