The Olympic Rings Series
Bradstock’s newest Olympic Ring Painting called “LA Rising” turns a negative into a positive.
Roald lived in Los Angeles for 6 years from 1986 to 1992 when he was training and coaching at UCLA. Seeing the devastation from the LA fires earlier this year (2025) had a huge impact on him. With friends and family living in and around the LA area he felt helpless. He felt their stress. He felt their pain. So, as he has done so many times in his life he turned to his creativity as a way of channeling his anxiety.
“LA Rising” is a large 10-panel charcoal drawing. Using charcoal (burnt wood) on paper (made from wood) as the medium was a deliberate choice as a reference to the LA fires, nature, and the environment. Roald wanted to create something positive from something negative (something burnt), sending a visual message of support through imagery. The symbolic 5-Ring Olympic logo is at the very core of this piece, with an additional 2028 rings of various sizes as a reference to the upcoming Olympic Paralympic Games in LA in 2028.
*It should be noted that this piece is not finished. There is one final step. Stay tuned to see the final phase.
Together
Bradstock unveils 7th Olympic Ring painting titled “Together”. This latest collaborative mural embraces every element of the Olympism Art Genre and celebrates a century of the Winter Olympic & Paralympic Games.
This 24-panel acrylic canvas painting captures and celebrates a hundred years of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Olympic Games. All the winter sports in both the Olympic and Paralympics are depicted and written and painted out. The names of all the winter sports, the cities and countries that hosted the winter Games, and the Olympic and Paralympic values, mottos and the names of the founders are also included, as are the flags of all the countries that hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
The penultimate step in the creation of this giant multi-paneled painting measuring 80” x 120” was drawing 2.5 km (1.5 miles) of lines over the painting to create a 184,240 1/8th square grid over the entire image in preparation for the final phase, where 100 high school students added their contribution. Using the square grid to guide them, they colored in the small squares, added small colored circles, and wrote in their names and the names of 57 winter Olympians and Paralympians from Lake Placid and the neighboring counties in the north country.
This collaborative mural was created as part of the first ever Art-in-Sport educational school program that embraced every aspect of the Olympism Art Genre.
Symbols On Ice
To celebrate the Art of the Olympians (AOTO) and Al Oerter Foundation’s (AOF) new partnership with the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) I wanted to create a new Olympic Rings inspired painting. This acrylic 36” x 60” painting called “Symbols on Ice” includes two sets of Olympic Rings – to represent the 1980 and 1932 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid. The four legacy sites and their respective symbols/logos are also embedded into the piece along with ORDA’s and AOF/AOTO’s logos. The overall design for this painting is an aerial view of the 1980 Lake Placid hockey ice rink where USA beat the USSR to win Olympic Gold.
Struggle for Perfection
Twenty 25 years ago this month – November 1997 – l painted my first Olympic Rings painting called “Struggle for Perfection”. Two years later, that very same painting won the United States Sports Academy /United States Olympic Committee Sport Art Competition and went on to represent the USA in a International exhibition in Lausanne in 2000 at the IOC museum, as part of the 2000 Sydney Olympics cultural events. This accomplishment led to the “The Olympic Picasso” media nickname (CNN interview).
2012 Rings
My second Olympic Rings painting was done in the build up to the 2012 London Olympic & Paralympic Games ( Title: “2012 Rings” ) when I was working for the British government as an Olympic Sports Art Ambassador (BBC interview/article).
Olympic Art Project
The third Olympic Rings painting was a 15 panel collaborative piece I did with 111 other Olympians (an unofficial world record) for the 2018 Olympic Art Project at the 2018 Olympic Games in PyeongChang – some of the other Olympians included IOC President Bach, HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco and WOA President Joel Bouzou. (IOC article 1) (video) (2018 Pyeongchang OLYMPIC GAMES)
Olympic Strong
The fourth Olympic Rings piece was one of the paintings I did for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Agora project ( Title “Olympic Strong” ). IOC article / Olympic Museum Instagram / “Olympic Strong – Time Lapse”
Paris 2.024 – Together
While my media nickname is “The Olympic Picasso” it is actually French artists, for the most part, that have had the most influence on my art.
To celebrates the 25-year anniversary of my first Olympic Rings painting l decided to create another one, my fifth to be exact, in this on-going series.
I think of this Olympic Ring series a little like Claude Monet’s Haystacks and Cathedral paintings that are painted at different times of the day and year so they capture a different feeling of light, color and temperature. For me, the Olympic Rings series is capturing me at moments in time on my continuing Olympic journey.
This latest work, called “Paris 2.024 /Together”, is a celebration of my Olympic journey and the summer Olympics Games in Paris in 2 years. It pays homage to French artists Henri Matisse and Georges Seurat as well of course to Pierre de Coubertin and the Olympic Rings logo he designed that is now one of the most recognized symbols in the world. The paper collage measures 60” H x 100” W pays tribute to Matisse’s paper cut outs and his “drawing with scissors” technique. I’ve taken his technique one step further though to “drawing with a knife” as I used an X-act.0 knife for all the cutting. Also, I did not use any glue. I developed a new collaging technique to create this work where I use only tape to attach the paper together – everything is attached from behind. I used over 1200 feet of masking tape to make this artwork.
In tribute to Seurat and his pioneering Neo-Impressionist Pointillism technique I broke down the Olympic Ring image into 24,000* coloured paper squares. *( 24,000 is a reference to the 24 in 2024). I took Seurat’s idea of using points of colour to create other colours and instead created coloured pixels and shapes that when optically over lap change colour and create the illusion of becoming solid, translucent or even transparent.
The collage uses 206 different coloured papers and has all 206 National Olympic Committee logos embedded throughout, sprinkled like dots of light as in Renoir’s “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette” painting.
One of my goals with this piece was to capture effort, time, passion – things that are hard to if not impossible to quantify.
l expand on the symbolism of the Olympic Rings with this piece and play with contrasts and contradictions:.
The medium for this piece is “Old School” / traditional if you will – It’s just bits of colored paper. The main image – the rings – is also “Old” but the way it has been constructed is new. The huge field of tens of thousands of coloured pixels give it a playful Lego feel but also a digital quality due to the QR code shapes and QR inspired images throughout the piece.
The goal and hopefully the result is an image that acknowledges the past, recognizes the present and looks to the future.
* Repetition of shapes, lines and colors, in all my work are in reference to being an athlete and what athletes do to reach their potential: repeat exercises, and movements to become stronger, faster, more flexible and more proficient at their chosen sport.
The 60” X 100”, 24,000 square paper collage is comprised of ten 30” X 20” panels, so the work can be displayed one of two ways:
1. They can be physically or digitally joined together to form a single image.
2. They can be physically or digitally displayed separately to form 10 images that connect to reveal the Olympic Rings
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