19F-1 (January 1) New Year wind

The tide was right, but the weather was up for grabs. I decided to attempt a New Year sculpture. Weather had the final say; read the report below for more details. Clicking on an image will present a larger version.

Photograph by Larry Dudock

 

Finale/Beginning

Early December brought storms external and internal. Thanks to happenstance and a more or less prepared mind, I'd become a reciter of poetry in Second Life. That led to a need to write more, and I concentrated on that for several months.
    I enjoy writing, the craft of putting ideas into words that others can read to bring the event back to life in their minds. I discovered a new enjoyment of recitation through hearing others who have a real love for the spoken word and put themselves into it. Naturally, the part of me that believes survival comes from invisibility was upset by all of this, but nothing bad happened so the argument was based purely upon past events. Right now, this year, these months, I enjoyed it and so did those listening. I wrote some new stories and a lot of poems, and recited them all.
    I felt frustration growing toward the end of the year. Eventually I thought that it comes from a basic fact of recitation: I need an audience. While I enjoy doing it, it's not something I do by myself; there needs to be some communication both ways, rather like the musical programs I've done for years. Was I becoming someone who worshipped the crowd and wanted to please them so I'd get the chance to recite again? Given the nature of what I write, I doubted it but there was still a valid point at the heart of the argument.
    Sand sculpture started as an experiment and continued as an art, or a craft, done purely for myself. I could do sculpture quite easily even if there were no one else within sight on the beach.
    The external storms wreaked their usual havoc with the sand. Low tide is still a good time for walking. I arrived at the Venice Breakwater on a December morning and found an expanse of fine sand with a falling tide, and some mussel shells scattered about. I had nothing with me but the house key. An hour and a half later there was a sculpture and a man covered with sand.
    Two days later I planned ahead. In addition to the house key I had a handful of small tools as I walked to the beach. The first intimation of trouble came as I walked down the final hill to the beach and saw a huge breaker rise above the beach cusp, and then heard the roar and rumble of the break. The waves had moved in, and the sand was gone. I watched waves for a time and went home. Trying again two days later yielded the same result.
    The day before Christmas was cool and calm, with bright sun. Those big waves drive waves in, and where they are finally stopped by seeping into the beach they leave patterns of coarse grains and small shells. I like to take still-life photos of the patterns. I ambled along the beach, photographing.
    I forgot photography when I got to the Breakwater and found, much to my surprise, a crescent of fine sand. There'd been enough people passing by that there were no mussel shells left. Solve that problem later. Pile now while the conditions are good; I can carve with my fingers.
    Well, actually, I couldn't. Free-piling technique has improved through the years, and my fingers didn't make much of a mark while I broke some fingernails in the attempt. Fortunately there was a scrap piece of wood nearby, just sturdy enough that I could dig and cut with it.
    I even had the camera. After adding some decorative sand balls, I shot a round of photos. These were hand-held because the 100mm macro L lens has a stabilizer built in, and it is astonishingly effective. It even removes the effects of Post-Sculptural Palsy.
    The tide window closed after that. It would re-open around the first of the new year. Walks in the interim showed that the sand was here today, gone tomorrow. If I wanted to start the new year with a sculpture, I'd have to be prepared for anything. It turns out that I was prepared for everything but what actually turned up.
   
Build number: 19F-1 (lifetime start #345); monolith on low riser
Title: none
Date: January 1
Location: Venice Breakwater, isthmus
Start: 0900, construction time approx. 4 hours
Size: about 30 inches tall, 21 inches diameter
Technique: Latchform, Box Filter 2, three full loads intertidal sand
Digital Images: EOS-5D Mk IV, 100L, 24-70L, handheld
Volunteer photography: Larry Dudock, hand-held process and complete, and intervalometer
Volunteer videography: Larry Dudock, process and equipment
New Tools: none
New Equipment: none

The last time I was here the beach was covered with shells, which would have made free-piling impossible. It's still a simpler process so it's what I wanted to do, but I brought the full kit so that I could respond to conditions as they were.
    The morning started calm. I loaded the cart and headed out.
    Twenty minutes later, walking south on the Boardwalk, the palm fronds start to sing in a wind from the north. I stop for a minute. Abort? Go on? It's cold, and not that strong, so I go on.
    There is good sand, and not too many shells. But there's a layer of coarse sand mixed in everywhere. Using a form will allow me to work with this, so I set up on the flat area behind the Breakwater.
    A seal is perched on a rock at the north end of the breakwater. That's unusual for this place.
    The coarse sand is just the right size to plug the holes in my screen, making it very much work to wash the fine sand out through it. I compensate by making it short, three loads rather than four. At the end I'm glad it's done; my shoulders need a break.
    Along the curve of the beach to the south, the Penguin Swimmers are getting set up. Today is chilly and breezy. Not going to be much fun for swimming, especially after coming out of the water.
    I sit on a cart wheel and contemplate the stubby pile of sand. It's all potential at this point. Previous sculptures have been more about surfaces than spaces, and I'd like to continue that, but the problem comes in the sculpture being cylindric. What happens when surfaces meet? They take on default shapes. Well, with time, I can move the surfaces around and experiment with how to have them meet and change.
    This goes well for a time. The wind moves around to the south, then the east, then moderates to a gentle breeze. I can even feel my toes for a time.
    I'm about half done when, suddenly, the wind unsheathes its claws and comes after us from the north. I can feel it, rolling up its sleeves and getting ready for real work; gradually it builds to the point where snakes of bouncing sand grains slither over the beach to assault my skin. I'm on the verge of shivering.
    It just gets worse. I yield to Boreas, do some basic clean-up, call it done, and sign it. A few photographs, and a struggle to load the cart with the wind trying to blow everything away, and then I'm headed off the beach to the relative calm of the alley northbound.
    The sculpture shows I can still do it after a year and a half hiatus. It shows some design promise, too. On a warmer day, with more consideration, perhaps the ideas will come to fuller expression; unlike a poem, a sculpture is fixed in time with no possibility of future editing. There is no rewrite desk for the sculptural process.

   
Santa Monica
2019 January 3, 4

 

December 24: 18P-2 and still life

Earlier in the year I was thinking about doing some sculpture. The days were longer and warmer and I had something of an itch. As sometimes happens, though, other events changed my course.

I went to an event at Second Life's Fantasy Faire in which poets could read their work. My microphone didn't work but I had poems, so I asked a friend to read for me. She did, and forever changed how I think of reading. I'd been to readings but people didn't put any life into their work. Here, my friend put her life into my words and the poem came alive. I wanted to do more.

So, I started going to more readings, and writing more. That, and the repercussions, kept me busy enough and I didn't think much about sand sculpture.

Eventually the storms died down somewhat. I went for a walk on the beach, December 16th, and found Venice with a large expanse of fine sand. I forgot about the walk, and although I had no tools I started making a pile. There were mussel shells around for carving.

I went back two days later with a handful of tools. Everything was changed. Huge, strong surf drove in well beyond the beach cusp and removed all the fine sand. Two days later the story was the same, but there were beautiful high icy clouds that burned with colors near the sun.

A few days later, tired of being indoors, I picked up my camera and headed for the beach. When the spring tides push over the cusp, the waves often leave beautiful patterns of shells and coarse sand behind. I wanted to photograph some of these still life formations. I did so, working my way south. I also found a big windrow of tangled kelp.

At Venice, much to my wonder, I found fine sand. Not just in a thin layer on top, but deep enough to work with. There were shells, stones and coarse sand mixed in, but I found a stick to carve with and started piling.

I learned something from this. Free-piling technique has improved through the years; I tried to carve this just with my hands but about all I accomplished was the breaking of fingernails. The stick saved me. being just sturdy enough to last.

Also, tools have their effect on the shape of the piece. Most of my sand sculpture history now includes a selection of tools made for the purpose, and most of what I know came from the tool-using era. Having only a stick brought me back to the beginning, and gave me a new look at how tools work with design to produce a sculpture.

Jewels Underfoot XI: Marina del Rey black sand

One day I was walking along the beach, just being there. I ended up going south of the Venice Pier, all the way to the Marina del Rey entrance channel. Can't go farther south from here without a boat.

I noticed a patch of darker sand up at the high tide cusp.Taking a closer look I saw that it was black, unlike anything I've seen here. My first thought was that it was polluted sand dredged from the channel, which idea a lifeguard corroborated. As I thought about it, though, this didn't make much sense. I picked up a handful and washed it in the ocean. Nothing happened. It didn't feel oily, it didn't float, it didn't dissolve. I found a cup and took some home for a closer look.

Later on I went back for more. About halfway back home from that trip I began to feel the weight. This stuff is more dense than the common sand. I did some research.

Magnetite forms in swamps. Ballona Creek used to be a swamp. How this small patch of magnetite ended up here I don't know.

When I took some macro photos I got a surprise. Most of it is black and fine, but there are other characteristic grains mixed in, such as garnet. What a fascinating sculpture could be made with this sand.

This sequence of photos zooms in step by step. The first one is the full frame scaled to the blog dimensions. These first three were shot as an experiment on a cloudy day using manual white balance from a grey card.. 
Click on any image to see it full size.

The image below has been cropped to about half the original frame, then scaled to the blog to get in closer.

This image is at maximum size, cropped to actual pixels. The area is about 15mm wide.

This maximum magnification image was shot earlier under sunlight with a diffuser.

Not being all that happy with the photos taken under cloudy light, I took some more today. The day was clear, just a high white haze, so I used a diffuser to cut down the specular highlights. The original is 6720 pixels wide; I cropped that to 3360 and then scaled to 1536 and used unsharp mask.

Jewels Underfoot X: Dunhuang, China

A co-worker went to tour parts of China, and took a camel ride near Dunhuang on the Silk Road. He brought back a sample of sand for me.

It's beautiful sand, and tricky to get the color balance. The new GIMP 2.10 makes some of this easier, so I made a new edit on one of the photos. These were photos I took before I had better control of the photography itself.

The Unsharp Mask took in GIMP 2.10 is also better. Easier to use, I can see the effect, and does a better job os sharpening with fewer artifacts. This image is the best I know how to do... right now. Click on it to get a bigger version.

I wasn't all that happy with the color balance in the Dunhuang sand. It's very sensitive to variations in light and nothing looked right. So, I did a manual white balance from a grey card and got color I liked better.

Then Blogger threw a wrench into the works. With the camera pointed straight down, it doesn't really know which way is up so it makes a guess. Some images are properly horizontal, others are rotated 90 degrees, and some are rotated 270. GIMP asks me what I want, and brings the image in horizontally. I do the edits. Upload to Blogger and it goes by the original EXIF data, which makes the lighting strange to my eye.

I tried various ways to get the image horizontal. The only one that worked was to open the image with Digital Photo Pro, rotate, export as TIFF, edit that in the GIMP to do color balance. Yes, it comes out horizontal as I want, but yeow. What a hassle. There must be a better way.

The image below is of the manual white balance one, but it's a quick edit to see if the concept works. I  overdid the contrast adjustment. I also notice a color shift between the thumbnail below and the enlarged view; the latter goes pretty strongly green-blue. Sigh. This works better in Second Life slide shows, where what I import is what I see on the display.

Jewels Underfoot IX: Hawai'i Mauna Kea Beach

This sand is from Mauna Kea Beach on the big island.

Jewels Underfoot VIII: Hawai'i Hapuna Beach

Here's another new look at Hawai'i sand. This is from Hapuna Beach, at Kohala on the northwest coast of the big island.

Photographs taken with a 100mm macro lens on a full-frame digital SLR camera at closest focusing distance. Sand is on a white porcelain platter under a diffuser, with the camera looking straight down.

Sand from Hawai'i Hapuna Beach. Click to enlarge.

Sand form Hapuna Beach. Click to enlarge. For some reason, Blogger wants to show this vertically. It should be horizontal, upper end to the right.

Sand from Hapuna Beach, Hawai'i. Maximum magnification, 1:1 pixel view. Should be horizontal with upper end to the right.

Jewels Underfoot VII: Hawai'i Punalu'u Beach

I recently gained access to three more samples of sand from Hawai'i (the big island). This sample is black sand from Punalu'u Beach, on the southeast coast. It's fascinatingly different from the black sand I've seen elsewhere.

I'm guessing this sand is older, due to the polish and the lack of olivine. In direct sunlight it sparkles brightly. All images here were taken using a diffuser to cut back on specular highlights. 100MM macro lens on full frame digital SLR, mirror lock-up, self-timer. The sand is on a white porcelain platter.

Punalu'u Beach sand. Click to enlarge.

Punalu'u Beach sand, closer view. Click to enlarge.

Punalu'u Beach sand, maximum magnification, actual pixels. Click for full size.