99F-9 "Balance"

How odd it is to have the sun well up and the day rapidly warming as I ride to the beach. Tides and weekends gradually get out of sync, with the best days actually in mid-week, so every few months I switch weekends. Usually I take a day off and do a long-way, three week transition but there are too many ideas rattling around for me to want to skip this one.

Build number:	99F-9 (lifetime start #165)
Title:	"Balance"
Date:	July 23
Location:	Venice Breakwater, south side
Start:	0945; building time : 7.5 hours
Height:	4.4 feet
Base:	1.75 feet (cylindric)
Photography:	one roll RA135-24 w/LX and 85mm

With the low tide only going to 2.4 feet I'm worried about sand, but needlessly. The first shovelful looks good. A bigger problem comes roaring and clanking from the County maintenance building, but I stake out my territory and the little bulldozer stops just short of my borrow pit. He's up here to clear sand from around the storm drain overflow. He'll get to do it again tomorrow. Rich walks up while I'm taking the usual pile-completion break. We talk of computers and music while I munch, but my mind is elsewhere. It was a busy week at work and I need all my wits for sculpting. It's a good pile, with the faint horizons that indicate sand that's more uniform than usual. It rings when struck. This is why I work in Venice. I have no real plan. "I can't think of anything." I start walking toward my bike, but Rich just laughs. An idea glimmers: two surfaces meeting at about 90 degrees, one undulating, the other leaning outward. Sand falls in big chunks; the Super Slicer makes this sort of sand removal quick and easy, and I"m committed. "Would you like to model one of our shirts? The picture will go on our Web site." She has an armload of aloha shirts and similar shorts. "Sure. As long as you don't mind getting sweat and sand on it." She shoots a couple of digital images, crowing over each one as if she'd figured out cold fusion. Today seems to be the day for models; VH-1 is in the parking lot and others shoot on the beach. Everyone wants a piece of the Venice fantasy. Below the outward-leaning surface a curved panel bulges out and down. How to make it meet the upper suface? An overhang would look good, so I curve the lower panel around to the west and south, under the end of the leaning panel. That projection was intended to be just that, but that's too simple, so I develop it into a knot that has powerful repercussions. I'll have to hold it up there somehow. "I can't believe this!" I turn around. "I was here last Christmas, on vacation, and you were doing a sculpture. Now I"m here on vacation again and here you are!" He shoots a few images for his Web site. The wind has become positively boisterous, making the kite dance as if it wants to fly away free and turning my sunscreened face into sandpaper. A fog of fine sand hovers just over the beach and spray from the breakwater builds up on my glasses. Whitecaps run shining to the horizon and the few sailboats are heeled sharply. Wind plus fatigue makes it hard to work. I remove awareness from almost everything but the sand. Design desiderata change through time. I used to be satisfied with a sculpture, any sculpture, that was standing at the end of the day. They were simple affairs, legs of various shapes meeting at the top. Now I'm disappointed in any part of a sculpture that simply looks like a leg, there to support something else. I expect every piece to contribute to the design. My current trend toward simpler sculptures aids this in some part, but with fewer parts each one of them has to contribute more. The spaces separating hard parts should also contribute, which is more easily done in complex sculptures as the spaces become interesting nearly by default. Here we have a need for bold parts and bold spaces. With that big knot up top it's a tall order, but I hollow out the knot's southern aspect to reduce the engineering demands below. This produces a tendency toward legginess which I can't solve right now so I move on to a different place. On the northeast side is a big flat panel that was the start of carving from the bottom up. The experiment paused and then was bypassed. Now I have to work it into the design. I cut the undulant surface back into the pile so that it curves into the inside of the bulging northwestern panel. Between the two I cut deeply to connect with a space on the southwest, and the new Steel Finger with its sharp curved blade digs easily. The bulging panel bends in below the knot as it wraps around to the south. It ends against a mass of sand that will have to remain to hold up the knot, but I carve a narrow space into the sculpture's heart, meeting the extant hole. Around to the east more help is required. I've carved the top of the undulant panel around to the west so as to provide counterpoise, but below that is a whole lot of sand that's close to taking on default shapes, just to hold itself up. Surely I can do better, but my foggy brain resists being flogged into better choices. I persist and make bold cuts with the small knife, splitting part of the mass away and wrapping it around another entry space and back up. Below that I cut the base deeply until it looks good. A few minutes later, in removing waste sand I discover I'm four inches from the real base and the little flat undercut turns into a big flat undercut. I'm beginning to wonder what's holding everything up there; I've never put so much sculpture on so little base. But it is well connected and counterpoised, and it's a good pile. Only details remain. Clean-up here and there, and corrugation on the big bulging panel. It winds up looking rather like half a big squash. The leaning panel above it catches the afternoon light nicely, making interesting subtle shadows. Final cleaning is easy on these simple sculptures. "It works well." "Yah, Rich. It's strong without being slabby." I've done similarly simple sculptures but they've always been made of stiff slabs. This one is much more fluid and the meetings between parts are more interesting. "I'm off now." "Bye, Rich. I hope you get your computer problems solved." "So do I." I wander around in a daze, looking at the sculpture. An energetic wave races up the beach, swirling around the sculpture's base. I tremble, but it stays together. It impresses the crowds. Many say "Thank you" to me and it even gets an alpha-turn salute from a jogger. "Now they've given me a real truck!" "Oh, oh. How'd you manage this?" Jim is tooling down the beach in a big lifeguard truck, helpless passenger looking on. "It comes with the job." "You're a little out of your territory, aren't you?" "Yes. We came to see your sculpture, and egage in a little petty thievery." As usual his comments make me curious. "I'm not even going to ask." "Good thing. What you don't know you can't tell." The last time they did anything like this was when Bruce managed the tower here. He got several friends together and they swiped a bench from the boardwalk area to put by the tower for the surfers and their friends. The direct approach. I like it. I shoot some photos, then hang around eating the rest of my meager lunch. I'm hoping for softer light as the sun approaches the horizon. The wind eases, laying the kite on the ground. Low angles don't do much to soften the sunlight; all that happens is shadows get longer. I shoot the rest of the roll and leave, too tired to feel much of anything but the sculpture singing.

Top of Page Library Human Touch Museum 1999 Sculptures 1998 1997 1996 1995 All contents copyright 1999 by Larry Nelson lord_chaos@compuserve.com Written 99 July 24 HTML conversion July 30

99f09rpt.htm 99 July 30