Beauty Is In the Eye of the Beholder … On a French Cycling Trip

You never know what amazing piece of art is just around the corner, down the cycle path or in the medieval village when you’re cycling around France. The place is full of great art! Like this…

This strange (IMHO) statue is in Creon along the Roger Lapebie bike path that runs for 57 kilometers from Bordeaux to Sauveterre-de-Guyenne. It’s a great path (a cycling work of art), and when I first rode it in 2018, as part of my Biking Bordeaux trip, this statue was just a big block of cement with a few cuts and carves. A work in progress.

“What will it be?” I wondered.

On my 2019 Biking the Dordogne trip, I rode the Lapebie path again, on the way to Sarlat, and there it was: the finished statue, in all its stone glory. It reminded me of what the great Michelangelo supposedly said: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

I just had to stop and stare, wonder and even chuckle. It’s two people on a bike, the guy pedaling and the woman riding on the handlebars. Most of the bike is still encased in stone, so perhaps, it’s still a work in progress and the artist is still discovering what’s inside. The two people are not engaged in anything of a more sexual nature (I think/hope) … and I’m pretty sure that’s not even possible on a bike, without crashing. If you do try, please wear a helmet!

I apologize to the artist, as I’m sure he/she put their heart and soul and artistic talents into this. Perhaps some of the cyclists who ride by love this statue. What do you think? After all, art is subjective.

The cycling statue above somehow reminded me of this giant, plastic sculpture, which is one of my all-time favorite sights in France. It ranks right up there with the Pond du Gard, Mont Ventoux and the view from Domme…

What the heck is going on here? Why are the members of this family stacked one on top of the other? Are they watching a parade? The Tour de France go by? And why is the father coughing? Is he sick? Is he dying, and this is the family’s final vacation together? If so, wouldn’t the kid be sad, perhaps even crying. Maybe they haven’t told the poor kid that dad has some sort of horrible, terminal disease and there’s a 50-50 chance he has inherited it. This plastic bit of kitsch is on the D 110 road just north of the little village of Villandrut in the south of the Bordeaux region, where this castle resides…

So, as you can see, medieval man was capable of producing some interesting work. Here’s another example …

OK, there you go, I hope you had fun at my French art museum. And goodbye from the Kysmar family …

If you liked this story, check this one out on why France is the best country in the world for cycling trips … in my opinion.

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Here’s the link to my Biking France books (Provence, Bordeaux, Normandy, the Loire and the Dordogne). I recently took all five off Amazon, iBooks and all the other eBook platforms because they took about 60 percent of the revenue. Now, thanks to even more tech advances, I can make them available as PDFs.