SAND DRAWINGS

Sand the earliest simplest drawing medium. With it’s sensuous colors and textures (how it feels), it’s relation and interactions with water and wind, and as granular geologic fragments, remnants, and memories of many earlier places and times, sand is spiritual earth ground, and blank sand a field of innate potential.

I have been doing sand drawings with photography since 1979. Besides single drawings and small sets, some large works of mine are or contain sand drawings: our love, being our seeing together, metaphysics, in the earth, light in the silence, and others.

My sand drawings derive in some ways to moments of study and discovery when I was a kid (and later). As a kid drawing in yard soil with a little stick, or on neighborhood sidewalks and curbs in front of my home with pigmented rocks collected from around our yard. Placing pictures in my world. And later also reading about and seeing pictures of ancient Native American and prehistoric European rock art.

With ancient rock art, the pictures and graphic representations that prehistoric peoples placed in the natural world, one sees not only images, signs, motifs, and symbols but places as well. Every natural place in the world a treasury of pictures, stories, metaphors, metaphysics, and meanings, in its living creatures and land forms, and in rocks, plants, trees, forests, streams and waters, skies. The natural places and times where most prehistoric art was created and exists are an integral part of the "meaning" of the art. Placing the artist or creator and the art as part of the more-than-human natural world. ‘Picturing’, and ‘art’, not separate from life, not separate from nature, not separate from being alive in the world.

Sand drawing is inscribing, placing, planting pictures, signs, symbols in sand, in the ground, in the earth. One sign, symbol, drawing, picture having one or more than one feeling, meaning, energy, function. The drawings include ‘picturing’ real creatures (including me and others) and imaginary creatures (biomorphic and geomorphic), other life forms, and our/their shared spiritual metaphysical place-times, life moments and mappings, and living ecologies. And elemental signs, symbols, visual metaphors drawn/abstracted from natural history, geographic and geologic pictographic mapping, electronic schematic circuitry, mathematics, and the physics of electricity and magnetism, light and optics. And from my imagination.

Most of the sand drawings composed earlier on paper at home. To draw in the sand I use a small stick or twig (or sometimes alternatively a flat wooden toothpick). The small stick or twig derived from native trees and plants in my home garden grown from seeds collected by me in some of the places pictured in our love, or in photos in metaphysics, light in the silence, seeings, and other works. Drawing with these sticks creating and reinforcing my connective bio-graphic ecological place/time art/life continuity.

The drawings are done (early) morning at ocean beaches at very low tides, the receding ocean revealing blank smooth sand. Only present for a moment in the sand, the drawings are erased when the tide comes in, when the ocean returns.

A few drawings have been done at other places: dry stream or vernal pools, stream and pond sand banks, and on bare ground in forests, groves, meadows, seasonal wetlands, near water falls, and other places. And some at home in trays of special collected sand.

I have drawn and photographed many sand drawings, several hundred over more than 47 years, starting with our love, my first and largest collection of sand drawings, and later for metaphysics, being our seeing together, in the garden, in the earth, light in the silence, and other works. The sand drawings in these works appear alone, in pairs, and in open-field or sequential multi-image composites.

Creating sand drawings is having a magical spiritual world view, of shared identity (co-existence, co-being) between self, land, place and universe. Placed in the natural world (and in electronic picture world as a part of nature), sand drawings are spirit imprints, thought-forms with energy. Drawn in sand, the drawings place meaning, the fundamental original grounded-ness of meaning.