Happy French Countryside Day!

Day Six: Into the Mountains Again

We started our day with some breakfast in the local fresh market. There has been a fresh food market in this square since the fourteenth century. We found a nice cafe in a corner of Richelme Square next to a fountain featuring a wild boar made of bronze. The giant bronze boar is is one of many that are fashioned after a seventeenth century statue in Florence, Italy. Around the base of the fountain are details like lizards, frogs, and turtles. There is a tradition of rubbing the boar's snout to signify that you hope to return to it one day in the future.

After eating our breakfast in a cafe literally right next to the fountain, we rubbed the boar's snout and walked around the market, picking up some bread, fruit, and cheese for our planned picnic lunch later that day. Our original plan for the day had us travelling to Arles to visit the Foundation de Van Gogh but it turns out they are not open on Mondays so we opted instead to go check out a sculpture garden located at a vineyard that Edouard had told us about.

We left Aix and wound our way through the hills and beautiful countryside until we arrived at Chateau la Coste, the site of the sculpture garden. Pulling into the site, we knew we were in for something special. A large, shallow pool of water stretches in front of the bookstore/entrance and standing upon this pool is a large sculpture of a spider. If you're familiar with the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (for those of you who have been to or gone past the National Art Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, you've no doubt noticed her sculpture Maman, a giant spider, standing tall in front of the building) you would recognize her work as we did when seeing this sculpture called Crouching Spider. It's an impressive site and it set the tone for what we could expect throughout the grounds of the vineyard.

Having visited a few sculpture gardens before, we were expecting to see some interesting sculptures, usually pieces by small, local artists we didn't know, while enjoying the natural landscape. When we paid our entrance fee and were given a map, we were quite surprised to see so many names we recognized (Rebecca recognized artists that she admired while I was wondering if the sculptures listed as works by Bob Dylan and Michael Stipe were the singers I knew or not; there were, more on this later).

There were two sections to the gardens. The first was a path that takes you into the vineyard and the foothills behind it, winding through the forested hills. The second path was a smaller route, set off on the side of the grounds, through some hills and fields. We were told the first path would take an hour and a half while the smaller path would take closer to thirty minutes. We opted for the large path first.

The path starts by taking you around and through the grape vines and into the hills. There were sculptures along the path as well as a couple signs. The first sign contained photos of the different leaves of the grape vines, allowing you to discern what kind of grapes (and therefore wine) were being grown in that particular field of grapes. The second sign explained that, while we were walking through the grounds, there was a chance we would run into some dogs as there was a heard of sheep being kept in a fenced off, neighbouring property. We did hear the dogs barking a couple times and did get a chance to see some of the sheep grazing in a shaded field at one point.

After completing the longer path, we found some shade and shared our picnic we had prepared for that morning at the market. Once finished our food, we set off for the shorter path to see more of the works and natural landscape the area had to offer.

There are too many works to list so I will just hit some highlights here:

The centre itself as well as several pieces throughout the grounds were created by a Japanese artist and architect named Tadao Ando. I really enjoyed his piece called Four Cubes to Contemplate Our Environment. Set inside a building he designed, you must wind around, down to the floor where the cubes are located using on the light provided via the natural sunlight that seeped through strategically placed gaps in the outer walls. Once in the room with the very large cubes, you are left to contemplate humanity's relationship with the natural world. It was a beautiful, immersive experience.

There is a piece from Alexander Calder called Small Crinkly that sat in a shallow pool of water on the opposite side of the building from the spider I mentioned before. I've always loved art that moves and interacts with its environment and Calder's works often do. We sat for awhile enjoying watching Small Crinkly gently move with the wind.

So, it turns out Bob Dylan is a visual artist who likes to work with welded pieces. His piece, simply called Rail Car, is exactly that, a rail car. Sitting on a short track the rail car, which you can walk on/through, is made up from different metal objects welded together to make up the frame. It's a beautiful piece of craftsmanship and it was fun to look around and see how things like saws, wrenches, pulleys, and other objects were brought together to form the frame.

Tracey Emin's piece was easily one of my favourites. Its one of the most fun/inventive self portraits I've seen. Titled Self-Portrait: Cat Inside a Barrel, it's a barrel set at the end of a platform that overlooks a section of the forest. The barrel has a hole in the side so you can look inside and see a small cat sculpture inside. There is something about this tiny, vulnerable cat inside its protective barrel out in nature that made me like this self portrait more than most I've seen.

Prune Nourry's work, Mater Earth, is a large sculpture that depicts a pregnant woman immersed in the earth in the same way it would appear were she immersed in water. The parts of the woman that emerge from the ground are beautifully crafted and it was easy to to imagine this large sculpture as a living person. What's more, the inside of the sculpture's belly is hollow and you can crouch down and go inside where the artist has carved organic shapes in the inner walls of pregnant belly. It being so large, I kept noticing it from different angles as we walked the grounds, finding it a striking image every time.

Another singer, Michael Stipe, had a piece that is seven different sculptures of foxes on a hill, surrounding some trees. Foxes was made using a mold that, when used for each fox, created slight differences in each like bigger openings in the mouth or a seam on one's back, etc. I especially liked the touch that Stipe specified that "children are welcome to climb on the foxes".

Ai Weiwei's piece was another favourite. Ruyi Path, a literal path, connects an ancient roman path on the vineyard grounds to another, modern path. Weiwei's path is in the shape of a ceremonial scepter, known as a Ruyi. We sat for awhile on the path, which has some raised areas that act as benches, enjoying the breeze in the shade, away from the hot afternoon sun.

After more than five hours of walking the grounds, we drove back to our hotel in Aix. We found a small restaurant just off of the old town center called Au Gout du Monde ("To the Taste of the World", roughly) where were the only diners on this Monday night. The food was excellent and the server was very kind and encouraged me to practice my broken French with her. Rebecca and I have both noted that we really have yet to meet or encounter the stereotypical "rude French" person so far in our travels. It seems, so far, like so many stereotypes, to be total bs.

This was a big day and therefore a long post. I'll try to keep them coming as much as I can but some nights I just want to get some sleep to prepare for the next day's adventure. Thanks for reading along! It's after midnight, so I'm off to bed.

P.S. The other thing that is slowing me down is that French keyboards are not the QWERTY keyboards I grew up with so I'm having to fix a lot of spelling errors as I go! Bon soir!