February 2009

Anyone who builds a sandcastle, or doodles on the beach, feels the
impermanence of such creations. It’s one of sand’s many qualities - for a
material that lends itself to sculpture, writing, and drawing, and for all the
toughness of the individual grains, it resists, in conspiracy with waves, rain,
and wind, any kind of durability of form. Ripples shape-shift with every tide,
dunes move on with every gust of wind - however nature or we may attempt to
shape it, these works are ephemeral. There are stories, some perhaps true, many
no doubt apocryphal, of Pablo Picasso sketching in the sand on a beach; in one,
he is pursued by a woman asking for a small sketch, and he obliges by drawing a
picture in the sand.

It is its ephemeral character that gives sand its role in the imagery of
passing time - and its uniqueness as a medium. It is that very impermanence that
is an intrinsic part of land art of all kinds, but of the work of one
extraordinary artist in particular.

Jim Denevan walks out onto a freshly washed Northern California beach, bends
down, and draws a circle, the size of a coin, in the sand with his finger. More
circles create a spiral nest, the outer ones growing larger. Using a driftwood
stick as his paintbrush, he draws bigger circles in the sand, each one nestling
with the previous; the design grows fractally. Denevan does all this
freehand—there is no outline, no preliminary design; the artwork simply flows
from his mind through the choreography of his movement. His work evokes a
Japanese *karesansui,*popularly known as a Zen garden, with its
contemplative design of raked sand. Denevan’s design is monumental, ultimately
occupying the entire width of the beach. He uses a large rake to highlight the
outline and to fill in the spaces with texture. A few hours later, the tide
destroys the art and renews the canvas. For Denevan, the transience is part of
the art; it recognizes “some kind of truth about life—what is grand, or what is
fragile. . . . Everything is transitioning into something else.” Denevan’s
designs are diverse, ranging from huge perfect spirals, to representational
images, to complex circles and linear shapes, suggesting a more fragile version
of the Nazca lines, the gigantic figures in the Peruvian desert—themselves
created by the removal of desert stones to expose the light-colored sand
beneath.

For Denevan, the process, the dance, the intimacy with the sand is a
fundamental component.

He recently made the world’s largest freehand drawing, this time on a dry
lake bed in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. It’s three miles across and he
walked a hundred miles in eight days to complete it. A desert storm washed it
away the following week.

Denevan also excels in a completely different form of ephemeral art - he’s a
renowned chef, creating unique culinary works inspired by local produce and
landscapes. Outstanding in the Fieldis now staging feast tours
internationally as well as throughout North America - Jim was incredibly helpful
when I was writing my book, and I have an aspiration to coincide with and
indulge in one of his events.

But to finish, I’ll return to sand, and celebrate the pleasure of its
impermanence through Jim Denevan’s own words:

One part of drawing in the sand that’s really great is that, no matter what I
do, no matter how big it is, I have a completely clean sheet of paper, meaning a
completely clean strip of sand that I can return to every day, and there’s an
incredible freedom in that kind of artwork.

[see http://www.jimdenevan.com/ and http://www.outstandinginthefield.com/.
The Northern California Public broadcasting station, KQED, has a terrific short
video of Denevan working and talking about it - http://kqed02.streamguys.us/anon.kqed/spark/jimdenevan.m4v] SIGNATURE

Originally published at: https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/2009/02/index.html