Wednesday 13 July 2011

Pic St Loup


Finally got round to riding up around the Pic St Loup last week, and returned yesterday to do the same loop of 68 kilometres but in the other direction. The Pic St Loup is a mountain, 658 metres high, poking up out of the plain about 25 kilometres north of Montpellier. There's no road to the top, but you can walk up it, and I have many times in the past, but the rather beautiful and desolate country to the north of the Pic makes great cycling terrain. I took the bike in the car and parked at Les Matelles and began my ride from there. The interesting stuff starts at the next village, St Mathieu, where the road starts to climb up between the Pic and it's sister, the Mont Hortus and at the top of the climb there's a spectacular view looking back towards St Mathieu. A fast descent then, and turn off the main St Martin de Londres road and head north to the very pretty village of Notre Dame de Londres. These back roads are very quiet and lonely. You can easily ride for ten or twenty kilometres without seeing another vehicle and could easily be abducted by aliens without anyone ever knowing! No flat roads here but constant short sharp climbs and descents. Pass through Ferrieres and Pompignan where there's a good sharp climb through a series of hairpin bends and you arrive on top of a desolate plateau that's not far off the height of the Pic which can be clearly seen on the horizon almost as if you could touch it. After the straight road which crosses the plateau, there's a long zig-zag descent down to Valflaunès and civilisation, then it's easy roads back to Les Matelles and my car. Once again I realise how lucky I am to live in such a great place with such superb bike riding available.






Friday 10 June 2011

Eddy

Finally got round to doing one of the great Eddy Merckx, who tops all the lists of greatest cyclist ever. Everyone loved his constant attacking style and his palmarès speaks for itself. 
60x60 cms acrylic on canvas - I'm really pleased with the way it's turned out.

click to enlarge



Yesterday's Ride

Did my 68k loop yesterday. Horrendously strong wind, especially at the tops of the climbs. Felt great to be out in the sunshine though. The vines are almost fully in leaf now and are that vivid late spring green. I like the sort of patch-work shape of the vineyards and the lines of the vines chopping across in different directions.





Sunday 22 May 2011

New "Sprint"

Just finished SPRINT #4. Probably more 'painterly' than the others so far. Doesn't show up too well on this small image, but there's alot of 'scratchy' brush work all over it when you see the real thing. Think I'll try a big one soon in oils, see what happens.


click to enlarge



Saturday 14 May 2011

Yesterday's ride

Got out on my local 56 kilometre loop yesterday. For once, we've had decent rainfall here over the last weeks, and on my recent rides I noticed alot of wild flowers, sometimes counting as many as fifteen different kinds, although I could only identify a few by name. Spring is the best season here, green and almost lush, and all the better for knowing that in a few weeks it will all be burnt brown by the Mediterranean sun. Anyway, I took my camera with me and took snaps of most of the varieties I saw, poppies, wild roses and wild honeysuckle amongst them. The last pic is of one of my favourite stretches of road here, wild, high and mostly traffic free. The mountain on the horizon is the Pic Saint Loup.








Tuesday 10 May 2011

Wouter Weylandt

The cycling world is in shock after the death of Wouter Weylandt on the 3rd stage of the Giro. Seems it was a freak crash on the descent of the Passo del Bocco witnessed by Manuel Cardoso.

"Wouter was dropped and tried to come back in the group. He then looked behind to see if it would be better to wait for the other dropped guys," Maertens recalled Cardoso's statements. "While looking behind he hit with his left pedal or left side of his handlebars a small wall and was catapulted to the other side of the road where he hit again something."

David Millar, in his usual eloquent way,  summed up what the sport means to so many people, despite it's dangers “I love cycling, and I've always been enchanted by the epic scale of it all, it was why I fell in love with it as a boy. Yet Wouter's death today goes beyond anything that our sport is supposed to be about, it is a tragedy that we as sportsmen never expect, yet we live with it daily, completely oblivious to the dangers we put ourselves in. This is a sad reminder to us, the racers, what risks we take and what lives we lead."

Saturday 30 April 2011

Mario Vicini

Here's another of my paintings. Mario Vicini in the Giro around the end of the 1930s. His bike is fitted with an early form of dérailleur similar to the one shown in the photo.


















Climbing Mont Aigoual

At least once a year I like to chuck the bike in the car and go and ride somewhere new. 

Last spring I decided to climb the Mont Aigoual. It's the second highest peak in the Cevennes at 1567 metres. I started at Le Vigan, about a two hour drive from my place. The ride begins with the ascent of the Col du Minier, a fairly gentle climb but twenty one kilometres long. It was a beautiful morning, but rather clammy as there had been massive rainfall the day before. Every hairpin bend seemed to have it's own small stone bridge with a stream, swollen from the rain, crashing down the side of the mountain. Lots of lush vegetation and trees too, so whenever I stopped to admire the view or to take a photo my glasses steamed up. As I climbed higher the trees began to thin out and be replaced with grass and wild flowers and in places the road twisted and turned around enormous rock formations that almost touched my shoulders as I rode by. Even a gentle climb can be hard when it's as long as this, so I was glad when I reached the sign for the col. I stopped  to eat a cereal bar and take the ritual pic of the bike in front of the sign. From the summit the road flattens and even dips slightly down to the village of l'Espérou where you turn left and begin the climb to the top of the Aigoual. There had been very little traffic on the Minier so I was shocked to find myself suddenly in the middle of bikes, cars and tourist buses. Rather too crowded for my taste, still, after about thirty six kilometres of almost constant climbing, it felt like being on top of the world. The big photo which heads my blog was taken about fifty metres from the summit on my way down. A shame the horizon is a bit hazy, but I really like that pic, as to me, it seems to really sum up what the freedom of riding a bike is all about. 


The descent to Le Vigan was incredible. By now it was lunch time and there was hardly any traffic, it was warm and sunny with very little wind, so I had the pleasure of twenty one downhill kilometres with sweeping curves and hairpin bends. During the whole descent only one car overtook me and I counted two going the other way! After a while my hands and wrists began to ache from being constantly in the same position but with the speed and the warm air I began to feel as if I was floating, as if the bike wasn't quite touching the ground. It was easily the most pleasant downhill ride I've ever done, and I can recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in the region.
































Wednesday 20 April 2011

Photography

I love taking photos, although technically, I don't know much about photography. I use my camera alot for recording references for my paintings, or taking snaps of bikes. I was on the Place de la Comédie one day snapping passers by for a project I was working on, when I saw these two go flashing by, so I just aimed and fired. There's a nice ironic twist of a cheap mode of transport carrying two people in front of Le Café Riche!


Wednesday 13 April 2011

Paris-Nice

An advantage of living in France for a bike nut is that one is never too far from a race, be it amateur or professional. I like to watch at least one race per season, and a few weeks ago managed to get across to Aix-en-Provence with a couple of cycling pals for the time trial of the Paris-Nice stage race. We spent the morning at the start wandering around the team vehicles, watching the mechanics get the machines out of the buses and getting up close to watch the fine tuning and last minute preparation of the bikes. Although they must get sick of being asked the same questions by the public at a time when they're obviously so busy, some of the mechanics are happy enough to chat for a while. After lunch we got out on the course to watch the riders. Unfortunately, the only conveniant spot was on a slight downhill stretch with a following wind! The speed they were doing was phenomenal, so we only saw them aproaching, then a low swooosh as they went by and disappeared round a curve. Mind you, I got some great "speed" shots which might well be worked up into paintings some time soon! 

Hmmmm....the captions are all over the bloody place despite trying different corrections. I suppose cheap blog software has it's limits, or maybe there's a tweak I must learn.......

Bradley Wiggins' TT bike
















Geraint Thomas' road bike











up close with the mechanics



















Geraint and Jeremy Hunt warming up












Nico Roche









Vinokourov

Tuesday 12 April 2011

Sprint

Here's one of my recent paintings. Massed sprints, especially between the best sprinters in the world, are one of the most exciting spectacles sport can offer. It's not easy to capture the colour, movement and sheer speed involved but that's what I was after. It's acrylic on canvas.


click to enlarge




Here we go

I've started this blog as a way of presenting two of my passions; bikes and painting pictures.

I like everything about bicycles. I like riding them, I like taking them to bits and building them back up and I like looking at them. And there are no limits to the kind of bikes I like. I happen to ride what are usually termed as racing bikes, but I'm actually interested in anything with pedals and two wheels. The bicycle could be called "the world's greatest invention", and indeed, there was a recent article in the Guardian on this very theme.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/mar/03/guardianspecial4.mattseaton
The article also includes a well liked quote from Iris Murdoch "The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart."
Amen to that!

Future entries will include descriptions of local rides, past and present, in this wonderful part of the world which has such a huge culture and history of cycling and cycle racing.