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96F-16"Faraway"July 20 | ||||
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Am I in California because of listening to all my brother's Beach Boys records? I'd just finished reading "The Nearest Faraway Place," a biography of the Beach Boys, when I started this sculpture and was thinking about the book as I worked. We're a long way from Kansas, but we originated within 100 miles of each other. Musical sunshine. I still listen to them. I normally do sculptures on Saturdays so that I can recover and contribute something to my job on Monday. I called Russ to see if he wanted to come up. "I'd love to. But I can only come on Sunday." So, I called Rocket. "Sure. I can help, but it has to be Saturday." What do I do now? It's strange, but the obvious solution didn't come to me for a couple of days. Help is very nice to have. Making a sculpture involves packing nearly a ton of sand and water, and that's just to make the pile. Then it takes another several hours to carve. With a helper to move sand, I save my energy for the carving and the result is a better sculpture. Carving takes concentration. Let Monday take care of itself; I can't turn down help. Rocket and his friend Andi came down for this first effort of a double-dipping weekend. The sand was good and the day was cool and foggy. Perfect. I'd gotten tired of the "torpedo" look, wherein all the sculpture's elements came up to a point. I wanted the top of this one to be something other than just the place where everything ends. This was the first step on a long divergence in my sculpting: I was thinking about overall design and not just carving element by element. The result is one of my favorite sculptures.
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