Absent, but not idle

 Since my last post, I've completed a choreography course, done some dance shows in Second Life, and helped others with their shows. I've written and read some poems, and some stories.

With the beach being closed last year until late June, I had tome for other activities. Once the beach reopened I went for walks but sand and tide timing didn't work out all that well.

Early this year I went to see Timothy. Since the beach reopened he has been going every day to work on his construction, with Mark accompanying him most days. He always brings an extra shovel or two. One day a friend of his was there with a concrete float. It seemed effective as I watched him work, so I tried it myself.

It's a marvellously versatile tool. Floats differ from trowels in that the bottom surface is curved transversely, so it can be used to smooth out the surface with less digging in. It's good for big, soft, non-detailed sand works, like the earthworks I sometimes do but on a larger scale. I've done upward of 30 of these so far.

One day there were many pebbles on the beach. After making my earthworks, I gathered pebbles and used them to make mosaic designs on the sand. I liked this, so the next time, because I can't count on there being pebbles down there, I brought some with me.

There will be photos eventually. I just wanted to send an "I'm alive" signal. Once I get some editing done, I'll add images.

20F-4 (March 27) The Conquerors Conquered

There were four members of the Happy Band of Goblikitepe Shovelers when I arrived. Hamish tossing up a storm, Veronica with what had been Hamish's shovel, which fitted her well, Mark with his earthworks, and Timothy doing details and supervision.

Four people can move a lot of sand. The lifeguard came by to deliver a Stern Lecture about Depth of Holes. Justified, I think, as I've nearly fallen into some deep holes people have dug. Timothy's usual practice is to make his trenches wide and shallow, but once Hamish gets a shovel in his hands he's hard to stop.

There was a tide-cleaned spot on the south, sand nicely dampened, so I set up there. Everyone else concentrated on their task, and the central pile assumed immense proportions as I slowly filled my form. By the time I was into carving, they'd done their day's work and were making plans for the next.

There was hilarity and an obviously non-compliant Official Builders Photo with the mound in the background. What would tomorrow bring? I held up my tiny carving tool while they brandished their heavy shovels. Congratulations! Another day of accomplishment, bringing smiles to beach-goers.

I went on with my carving. I wanted more of the sinuous ridges that I'd had in F-3, but they are surprisingly hard to bring out in the real sand. I learned more about this coarser medium, and started thinking about the next one as I cleaned up. By this time I was alone.

While walking around, looking for good photographic angles, I found the shovel Timothy had said was missing, left lying on the beach below Mark's earthworks. I picked it up. I'd bring it to him the next time I came to sculpt.

While I was loading equipment back onto the cart, I saw something familiar mostly buried in the sand. When Timothy's previous build was bulldozed, he lost both of his "Palladions," the finial logs. Up from the sand I pulled, with effort, the Lesser Palladion, disguised as a chunk of eucalyptus. I carried it over to the mound and placed it where Timothy would see it the next day; I'm not qualified in dealing with palladions.

Saturday morning I thought about going for another sculpture, but was still pretty well beaten up so I went to a poetry reading instead. After that I thought about taking Timoth's shovel back to the beach. I brought up the surf cam... and there was no one on the beach. Late, perhaps? I checked again an hour later. No people.

Then I thought to check his Instagram page. There was a reference to the Trojan horse, and some comments that suggested the beach had been closed. I dug for more info and discovered that yes, the government has decided that beaches are hazardous, so they're all closed.

The good point is that my sculpture stood for two days, getting knocked down by people not obeying the closure sometime Sunday afternoon. The bad point is that the Happy Band of Shovelers is sitting at home, prevented from the daily worship of the real world.

You can take a look at Timoth's Instagram accounts at goblikitepe. Maybe that builder photo was just too much for the powers-that-be.

20F-3 (March 25) What's Recovery For?

I've edited this post to correct the title. It really is about 20F-3.


Monday passed in a blur. I haven't done back-to-back sculptures in many years. Post-Sculptural Syndrome is cumulative, and eventually one pays. On Tuesday I was still paying and drifted through the day.

I woke up early Wednesday. I could walk and think. The cart was mostly loaded. In the predawn gloom I headed for the beach.

Timothy had added a new person to the Band of Happy Shovelers: Hamish. Young and strong, he went to work with a will. They were well along by the time I got there, and left before I finished. They'd moved a lot of sand. I moved less.

I've had this idea for a sculpture with curving ridges for a while now. It has proven to be elusive. This one was the best start on it, although it soon diverged.

The overall idea now is that I want sculptures that look like one piece, flowing. That also is proving elusive. Fortunately, practicing is enjoyable, out there under the morning sun.

I debated making more space, but wasn't confident enough in the sand to carve. I liked the contrast of the very complicated aspects with the simpler western side. There are so many ways to do this. One just has to choose a way and go. I can't make every idea in one sculpture. I planned on coming back Friday. Maybe this one would still be standing, so I'd have a multiple.

20F-2 (March 22) Magnetic Movement

I told Timothy I'd probably not be back on Sunday.

He wrote that he woke up Sunday morning and found he could walk, although "...we'd left it all on the beach yesterday."

I discovered the same thing. Slowly. But I could walk. So, I did.

 

Timothy and Mark had been at work for hours, and were close to being done by the time I arrived. I set up and got to work. Before he left, Timothy shot a round of video for his Instagram at goblikitepe.

No fancy base work this time. I was pretty much out of it, so did the basic basal clean-up and called it finished.

It takes some experience with new sand to find out what can be done with it.I was a little more familiar on this day, so pushed harder... and it didn't fall over. I haven't done any monolithic sculptures in coarse sand since 1995, and my skills have improved since then. In 1995 this wouldn't have been possible.

I was exhausted on all levels. Sand sculpture takes everything, mental, physical and emotional. I was pleased with our efforts and how the people on the beach encouraged us. A good day.

20F-1 (March 21) Past, Present and Future in the blender

"Social Isolation" or "distancing" aren't much of a problem for me. I've been crowd-averse for years, and have always preferred being outdoors. Beach walks are permitted by the public orders, not that I've been deterred from closed beaches before. Lightning is a better reason for staying away than is a writ.

I ran into Timothy again on Friday. Venice Beach was newly levelled and smoothed by the scrapers, and he was reaching for the sky again with economical tosses of his shovel.

My first sand sculptures were done with the sand immediately to hand. I didn't know better, although I did have a bit of dawning impression that there were differences and finer sand seemed to work better. Where I worked in those early years, there wasn't much difference to detect.

In 1994, after a seven-year hiatus, I returned to sand sculpture. I sampled various places, looking for better sand. Note that I didn't really know what "better" meant in the context of sand. An impression in the hand, and how the pile felt while I was carving it.

The revolution came in steps that were nearly imperceptible until they reached a new point on the learning curve and I looked back and saw how everything had changed. I discovered fine sand, made better forms and custom carving tools. The size of sand grains makes a big difference. Starting early in 1996 I carried fine sand from low on the beach to a building site above the coming high tide. The resulting sculptures were more finely detailed, and a delight to carve.

Then I got the idea for multiple sculptures. These were intended at first for contests as a way to be seen on a large contest plot. Soon the idea took on its own life. Given that I was now making three sculptures in one day, I had to save energy by using native sand from the building area. The result, at the time, was disappointing. Coarse sand can't hold details, and the sculptures looked heavy. It all left a bad taste in my mouth, so the multiple era ended in early 2003.

Not until 2018 did I come to a new appreciation for these. I was going through my images for a slide show and gradually realized that many of the sculptures were beautiful. My first impressions had been shaped by fatigue and comparison with the more detailed sculptures of fine sand.

In the meantime I was mainly doing free-piled sculptures because I could just go for a walk, and, if there were good sand, sit down and make a sculpture with hands and a mussel shell. But I had to take a camera to satisfy friends, and there is a pocket on the camera bag that will hold a few small tools. The system worked well.

And then I met Timothy. He works above the high tide cusp. Native sand only. On a Friday we got to talking about making something side-by-side. I remembered, hazily, those old native-sand sculptures and, early the next morning, was on my way to Venice Beach with my cart.

Timothy is more por-active socially than I am on the beach, necessitated by the scale of his project. He gets noticed, being well beyond human scale. People stop and talk. The sun rose, the clouds sailed overhead. The indoor, television-driven gloom doesn't hold up out here where there are three men flinging sand and other people walking. People told us they were glad to see us out there, making stuff.

Mark does earthworks right at the tide line. Tim does his megalithic worship. I come in with my engineered equipment and make curving vertical structures. There's something for everyone in this exhibition, and we're dead center on the Venice Surf Cam. We made a lot of people happy.

Timothy hadn't worked hard enough on his own project, so he went into some earthworks on mine. A gift of defining space.

In the end, I said "I won't be here tomorrow. I'll be a wreck. And I have an event to do later."
"Whenever you can come back, that's fine."
Mark added his thanks. An amazing day. There was an echo of Rich Johnson in the whole process, a bubble of sanity and stability that we made on the beach.

Zooming into the Future (March 15)

You walk the seashore and come upon ancient ruins. No people are left. The only evidence is their structures standing in windblown, sea-girt isolation. They'd been there. Where did they go? What was on their mind? The standard modern interpretation is "worship of the unknowable," but who really knows the mind of the disappeared sculptor?

Several times, walking Venice Beach, I'd come upon massive (truly) structures of heaped sand. Sometimes there was writing on smoothed areas around the base. Often there was a log on top. These could be seen from a long way off, in their splendid isolation on the morning beach. I approached, looked, found no clue in the footprints.

The 24-70 F/4 zoom I bought recently is said to have close-focus capability. I used to use a 60mm "Compact Macro" as my main walkaround lens. For the 8-megapixel 1D Mark II, it was fine. The 30-megapixel 5D Mark IV soon showed the lens' weakness, so I replaced it with the 100mm F/2.8 macro L. Magnificent lens, that one, and the stabilizer enables hand-held macro photography. Good reach, but hard to get a wider view, hence the new 24-70. But how good would it be? Let's go for a walk and find out.

I wouldn't know how well it performed until I got home. I'd read reviews and looked at samples. For years, while dithering on what to do.

The tide was low. There'd been flow out of the Rose Avenue major storm drain. I love the patterns left in sand by the flow of water, and the morning light produced great color and shadows.

 And then... I came up over the isthmus behind the Venice Breakwater and saw the megalith on the south curve below the big storm berm. Not only that, but there was someone moving around it, seeming to be centered on the towering mound.

No longer just an artifact left in mystery, it could be seen now as one man with a shovel bringing forth a vision with muscles and thought. There is an art to the use of a shovel. Use it well and your project goes up. Use it clumsily and your body fights you every step of the way. Like watching a good runner, watching a skilled shovel-user is fascinating. Every motion just so, with just enough energy to accomplish that little part of the task. You don't run a marathon as if it's a sprint. Turning a few shovelfuls in a garden isn't anything like moving three cubic yards of sand by hand.

And so I met Timothy, who comes to the beach just about every day to work on his project. Each day starts with the remnants of the day before and goes on from there.

This would be the last day for this particular build, he told me. The bulldozers were coming in the next week to level the storm berm. He was right; farther south the 'dozers were roaring in defiance of the sea as they did in hours what Neptune can do in minutes. A few days later I walked through Venice and saw them at work flattening the beach, pushing their puny blade-loads of sand. A tractor with a Fresno scraper smoothed out the grouser prints.

And Timothy was there, although I missed him that day. Farther north, defying the power of diesel and steel, standing against gravity and Beaches and Harbors with a shovel.

I went on my way south until the blather of bulldozers at the Venice Pier turned me back. There were more lovely patterns in the sand. Before too much longer I would see Timothy again, and worlds would collide. Megalithic determination met NASA-style engineering and, perhaps surprisingly, proved to get along just fine while others cowered indoors, watching the battlements for the viral invader.

 

20P-9 (March 7) A bit rushed

A couple of years ago, I bought a 100MM macro lens for my digital single-lens-reflex camera. I intended to use it for making sharp photos of sand, whose many beauties I'd discovered. That it has a built-in image stabilizer was a fact that didn't affect the decision to buy it.

I'm not as steady-handed as I used to be; I could hand-hold at a 15th of a second and get reasonable sharpness. Now, especially after sand sculpture... not really. So, one day I mounted the macro lens and used it to take some photos of a sculpture I'd already shot with the usual 24-70 zoom.

The difference was astonishing. I used the 100 macro for all subsequent sculptures.

But... the photographic tail was wagging the sculptural dog. That long lens required shooting at some distance, and pretty much precluded making multiple sculptures or even earthworks, even when shot horizontally to suit my Second Life image display device. I loved the sharpness, though, so stayed with it.

I did, however, start looking in two directions. One was a compact camera with stabilization, the other being a stabilized wide-angle lens for the big camera. After much dithering, the answer became "Yes." I bought a 24-70 F/4 zoom with stabilization, and a compact camera with stabilization and an electronic viewfinder. The latter was intended to come with me on walks when the big camera was too much to carry.

First up in testing was the zoom. I took it with me for this sculpture. I intended to do earthworks, and had a plan, but I allowed myself to be rushed. I was getting the sculpture in before a gig in Second Life, and I don't have a watch. The earthworks are rudimentary.

It's bean clam season. The sculpture was full of them. Not big, but still made carving a challenge.

On my way home, the post-sculptural dazed walk north along the beach with the low tide whispering on my left, I saw this clump of drying kelp under the very hard light. With the 100MM lens, I wouldn't have gotten the shot. Without stabilization, it would have been very blurry. The stabilized zoom worked very well. Not so sharp as the macro, but sharp enough that the GIMP's unsharp mask makes it look great on the big Second Life display. This shot is unsharpened, except in the effect of being scaled. I love the colors in this.