statues Archives – HIGH ON HOOKING

Statues in Bordeaux. — This…giant head is called **“Sanna”** and was created by Catalan artist **Jaume Plensa**. It’s in **la Place de la Comédie** in Bordeaux. Very cool.

Back to Bordeaux for another week and talking cool statues and sculpture.

Whether you hook rugs or draw or paint or in any way create “stuff,” you’re always on the lookout for other art that just might provide you with some inspiration. At least you should be. In theory. And given that we’re all carrying automatic copying machines around with us (in the form of our phones), there’s really no excuse for not making “graven images” of the things that call to us.

Okay, I admit that I often forget to jot down the artist info or even the name of some of the artworks I see when I’m out and about, but not in a museum or gallery with an identification sign conveniently placed near the object. I had to Google “large head sculpture in Bordeaux” to find out the info above. Enjoy!

That first night walking about the city, we came across the “Monument aux Girondins,” a monument/fountain created to memorialize the local heroes of the French Revolution. The various scenes portrayed seemed almost real in the dark and jet lag after traveling so many hours to get there.

Bordeaux statues. — Why, yes, I do see you pondering what this will mean for our future. Do you think that their wardrobes will contain something we can wear? I mean, better than these bedsheets.

Sorry, sorry! It was the jet lag like I said.

Meanwhile back to real life. These guys were in l’Eglise Collegiale de Saint-Emilion. It’s still a working church though not a monastery any more. Interesting fact we learned: Sincethe Revolution, the Catholic Church no longer owns any of the churches and other buildings in France. It only uses and administers them. Because of such dwindling attendance at Masses in the last decades, the churches do not receive much in the way of collections and support for these marvelous buildings. It’s up to the cities and government to take care of them. It also explains why you can roam at will through them; they are truly tourist sites.

Statues in Saint-Emilion church. — These guys were in the Eglise Collegiale de Saint-Emilion. Never saw anything like them in any of the Catholic churches that I’ve belonged to.

And then there were the carvings in the wall of a wine cellar beneath the medieval village of Saint-Emilion. Who knows when they happened or who made them?