TOUR DE FRANCE & ART

The route of the 2013 Tour de France was revealled a few weeks back we'll either get to visit the Castres to the Pyrenees stage or stay up at Toad Hall and see the one between St.Gildas and St. Malo. The exact route of each stage has not been published yet but I was desperately scouring the net to see if either of these stages had been raced before to get a  detailed breakdown of the courses, whilst doing so I got side tracked into cycling art.

This piece I like, at last something a bit different from the usual long brush strokes to express speed and movement, it's very basic but the starkness and the use of red give a sense of the emotion in the tour; often a lonely battle with your own inner demons for a long distance cyclist.

Surprisingly gentle colours and the pavement devoid of spectators show the other side of the tour, the long plodding kilometres and solitariness that a breakaway front runner can endure.

Above painting I like, below one I don't. The top one says everything about the mass of the peloton, the jockeying for position, the left to right movement of the cyclist as they constantly strive forward uphill, painted by Antonio Tamburro I think its just brilliant. The other painting is for me just O.K, it has movement but I feel its a bit of a romanticised view of the race, there are no guts here, just a bunch of cyclists going along and the yellow jersey happens to be out n front (taking a totally different line), nobody is fighting, hurting or possibly even breaking sweat, its all a bit airy fairy.

And finally something completely different. I think I found this on a blog page showing the top 10 worst tour jerseys of all time  ---  and this is my choice of the best of the worst!