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."