The Year in Sand: 2004

This [Emailed to friends] message may not make much sense. I'm very post-sculptural. Feel as if I got thrown out of a truck at about 65.3 miles per hour.
    The sculpture is interesting. Thursday I took the day off to prepare equipment, mainly putting a new slipsheet [liner to cover the form's patches] in the tall form. Thursday night i was sitting here and suddenly realized I was doing a sculpture the next day. What would I make? No idea. Nothing really came to mind. Oh well, solve the problem when it arise.
    I hit the beach around 0715 or 0730. Something like that. Lots of seaweed washed up. Nice thick overcast, cool breeze. Water was expensive: very far away due to tide. So I laid out a tarp for storing sand and used the cart to haul water four buckets at a time.
    The new slipsheet didn't tear, but the glue didn't hold. I don't know why the stupid thing won't stay put; the first one held for years. What do I keep doing wrong? Mainly trying to get more miles out of this old form; when the slipsheet let go it exposed more leaks. Still, it held up long enough and the pile turned out well.
    Now I had to carve something. Just as I was starting to carve, Carlos (co-worker) showed up with his daughter Jaqueline and step-daughter Sara. They were both very curious and asked lots of questions. Not conducive to the greatest design, but fun. So I just carved away, got myself into some design binds and kept going.
    It was fun. I'd get an idea and carve it without much regard for the overall design. That was already shot so why bother? And yet parts of it came together.
    It's reminiscent of 1998's overly complex sculptures, but this time it almost worked. Especially on the lower part of the soutwest side (the left image in the assembly). As far as I know this is the world's first instance of a curtain wall in a sand sculpture. The structure is carried by the internal supports, and the thin arabesque is purely decorative. I've never before done microsculpture at the base of a tall sculpture.
    Rich came up with the title "It's Baroque, but Don't Fix it" as a play on those excessive 1998 sculptures. They needed fixing. Well, they needed scrapping and starting over. The complexity in those pieces eventually came out in microsculpture elements and thus achieved some design harmony. Progression. This sculpture is a fairly violent collision of two competing design ideas. I just thought it was a lot of neat parts looking for a sculpture to be part of, hence "Looking for Community."
    Carlos had to take the children home but before they left I gave them a quick lesson in no-tools free-piled sand sculpture.
    Clean-up was nearly impossible. A proper job would have taken hours I didn't have. I called it quits at around 1730, making it the year's first 10-hour sculpture. And do I ever feel it.
    I was intently at work on something and a man asked "Do you think an ex-coach could do this?" At first I wondered what he was talking about, and then I realized I knew an ex-coach. Dave Mushegan, whom I met through Mosaic. He and his wife came out from someplace way far east. I introduced them to Rich and Carlos... a minute or so after they'd introduced each other. I was seriously underfed except for cookies and ice cream.
    The Mushegans and I repaired to Mosaic West (Casa Blanca) for some real food. That was a big improvement. I was, um, rather voluble. Normal speech controls had gotten lost some hours before. I had a good time. They said they enjoyed it but I can imaging them on the way home: "Does he talk that much all the time?" No, most of the time I'm quiet and shy. Really.
    This was the first tall-form sculpture I'd done in a year due to the problems with the form. Also the first sculpture of any kind done in over 2.5 months. That adds up to being out of condition for such a major effort... and it took five minutes to get out of bed. Linda asked me where I'd hurt in the morning. That's easy to answer: Everywhere. if it moves, it hurts.
    Yah, Rich handled most of the PR, but for some reason not that many people came to the Breakwater area. Very nice. So the crowds were elsewhere except for the locally-created one.
    The hit of the day was the watermelon chunks that Carlos brought. Very refreshing to an overworked sand sculptor on a day that ran warm at times.
    Was a fun day. The design's a little confused, but it was great fun to carve.

Mirjam's comments, 2004 July 24

"I KNEW you still could do it! This sculpture looks like you have spent many hours on it, and you were probably running out of time, otherwise the one symple side would have been decorated as well! It's a neat and jouyfull piece. I like the picture taken of the sculpture's top."

Format clean-up for blog: 2016 January 15