Ephemeral art: The crucifixion in sand
[or, What I did on my summer vacation this year, and other years]
My earliest efforts in sand sculpture as a kid were dolphins and sharks. The dorsal fin was the trickiest part: How do you get sand to stand up tall and thin on the back of what is otherwise a pretty straightforward pile of sand carefully smoothed into a particular shape? I also enjoyed doing sea serpents and sea monsters, and I’ve tried my hand at a couple of castles and some mermaids. (Once I did a whole mer-family, with a merman, mer-mommy, and merbaby.)
Over the last 20 years, the subject I’ve done most often, by far, is the crucifixion of Jesus. Here’s one I did five years ago that represents (ahem) a high-water mark for me.
If my most recent effort, created last week while on vacation in Ocean City, New Jersey, doesn’t necessarily surpass the 2019 effort in all respects, it’s a unique achievement in specific ways that make me more excited to try again next year! Here’s a view of the latest effort similar to the view of the 2019 effort above.
I love sculpting the crucifixion for many reasons.
It’s a tremendous subject on an aesthetic level alone—a dramatic anatomical study, formally but not rigidly symmetrical, arms outstretched, musculature ideally displayed.
For a summer-vacation amateur like me, it’s highly practical for working essentially in the horizontal plane. (Expert sand sculptors, often working with molding equipment, create blocks of super-saturated, compacted sand which can then be carved and chiseled like wood or stone, supporting sculptures of startling verticality. I generally work, though, in the simplest, most intuitive form of sand sculpting, sometimes called soft-packing—a method much more like molding clay than carving stone. My primary tools are my hands; I also sometimes use a shovel, a spray bottle, and, for certain detail work, something like a knife or a spoon and something like a spatula or a trowel.)
It’s also, of course, a labor of love, not just of the art form or the process, but of the subject himself. Like any extended effort of manual labor, the work is immersive and meditative, and lends itself to contemplation in a mode like praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.
A sand crucifixion elicits a wide range of responses from passers-by. Long before it’s finished, virtually everyone knows what it is, and many offer comments or strike up conversations. I’ve enjoyed people stopping to admire my dragons and mermaids, but when it’s Jesus, it’s an opportunity to connect spiritually with people. I get a chance to talk about what is most important to me and potentially offer other people an opportunity to do the same. I’ve always liked my children (and, depending on circumstances, their cousins or others who are with us) seeing me work on something overtly intended to give glory to God, even on vacation.
This kind of work is even in a way a leap of faith. I genuinely never know how it will turn out—if the sand will cooperate, if my brain and my fingers will be firing creatively on all cylinders, or if it will be a disaster. More than once I’ve been driven off the beach by biting greenhead flies that are not deterred by any amount of bug repellent, and can bite even through long sleeves and long pants!
Michelangelo reportedly said that he could see the completed figure he wanted to carve within the block of marble; his task, he said, was to remove the superfluous bits of marble that weren’t the figure, freeing it from the stone encasing it. I can’t work that way! What I do is more akin to loose, quick sketching; I don’t know exactly what I want the figure to look like, but I keep messing with it, adding or removing bits, until it stops looking wrong—or until I don’t know what to do, or I just give up in exhaustion. (This is also the way I draw, and the way I write!) To a certain extent I’m always surprised by the results, not always in a good way. My effort last year was downright disappointing, partly due to harassment from biting flies, but also due to my own creative juices not flowing.
I believe my first efforts to represent Christ crucified in sand involved some incomplete studies in 2005, and that my first completed crucifixion, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, was in 2006. That first effort was rather a rush job, 75 minutes in all, after learning that a sand sculpture contest was underway. (The competition wasn’t fierce, and I did win the contest.) Here are a couple of views of that first complete work.
Although this work looks weak to me now, the basics are all there, and everything I’ve done in the subsequent 18 years has been refinement. (Other than playing with sand, by the way, I have no meaningful background in sculpture. I did have a required sculpture class in my first year at the School of Visual Arts, but my efforts were entirely undistinguished and uninspired. My relevant background is my interest in drawing and cartooning.)
As relief sculpture, the projection level in this early effort is low, so that Jesus appears partially buried in sand. The chest looks somewhat caved-in; I didn’t understand yet how to make the arc of each side of the ribs and the pectorals rise toward the sternum. (There’s a similar caved-in issue with the neck of my 1983 salamander-dragon.) Other than that, I think the anatomy is pretty good.
Here’s one I did from 2014 that I believe took me under a couple of hours.
The projection level is significantly higher here (Jesus looks less buried in sand), although the chest still has a bit of a caved-in look. In my 2006 effort I represented Jesus’ hands as clenched-fist balls with the nail through the palm; here I put the nail through his wrists and have the fingers hanging down limply but stiffly. I have never come up with an ideal way of dealing with the hands.
A significant limitation in my early efforts is that I always gave Jesus an ample beard to hide the fact that I was afraid to try to sculpt a proper chin and neck. In these works, as a result, Jesus has a bit of a Poseidon vibe! I finally solved that problem in 2017, although overall my effort that year was not very successful.
Yikes. This corpus is cartoonishly muscular and unappealingly rigid—Jesus as superhero action figure. The head is too big; even the loincloth is exaggeratedly heavy! On the other hand, at last Jesus has a neck. I also finally introduced a bit of asymmetry into the upper figure by tilting Jesus’ head to his right. (Before 2017, all my corpuses were entirely symmetrical except that one foot was placed on top of the other.)
Two years later, in 2019, I had a breakthrough. This one probably took three to four hours.
For the first time, the posture of the corpus is not rigidly symmetrical, but has a genuinely dynamic quality. Not only is the head tilted to Jesus’ right, the torso and the legs turn back and forth in a way evocative of the S-curve often used in crucifixes over the last thousand years. Most exciting to me is how Jesus’ bent left leg rises off the sand so that you can see the wood of the cross underneath his leg.
After that, I didn’t do a sculpture at all for a few years, mostly because our vacation plans coincided with uncooperative tide schedules. Soft-packed sand must be wet but not saturated, ideally about a couple of hours after high tide to maximize the time before the tide rolls in and washes it away. I can’t work above the high-tide line, which entails either digging down to find wet sand or else carrying all the water needed—neither practical for my purposes. The best-case scenario is to start working as early in the morning as possible on a day with low tide around midday. (That first 2006 effort was made with the tide coming in—a terrible way to work, but they did the contest on the same day every week!)
This year, discouraged by my poor results last year, I started by going back to basics with a couple of studies: One morning I did an upper body, and the next morning I did a lower body.
The results were promising and boosted my confidence to go all out on the third day. At the same time, I feared the frustration of failing in the final effort after creating two good halves but being unable to bring them together!
Often in the past I’ve tried to work as quickly as possible to take advantage of the diminishing moisture in the sand. This year I decided that I would work fearlessly, taking as long as I needed to in order to get the best effect I wanted in each area—even if it meant not being able to do everything I might want to do.
Well, there was a cost. You can see in the lower-body study above that I was able to duplicate the bent left leg rising off the sand from 2019. When I tried to recreate it again in the final product last week, the thigh and knee collapsed—and I had to resign myself to redoing it with the leg flat on the sand.
The tradeoff, on the other hand, is that for the first time the legs aren’t fused together, shaped from a single heap of sand, but separate! Jesus’ right leg is dramatically bent to one side, displaying the inside of the leg and the cross between Jesus’ knees. This is an exciting advance, one I hope to build on in the future.
Another innovation I can’t believe I never thought of before was including a suppedaneum, or foot brace. (When used by the Romans in crucifixion, a suppedaneum aided crucified victims in breathing—thereby, of course, stretching out their deaths and prolonging their agony.) The feet have always been almost as difficult for me to manage as the hands, but the suppedaneum makes all the difference in the world.
Also, for the first time, in addition to tilting Jesus’ head to the right, I also rotated his head a bit so that his nose isn’t pointed straight at the sky. The torso is turned the opposite way—or at least it’s meant to be, though the effect is impaired by some anatomical mistakes—creating a more dynamic posture than in 2019. The head itself, as in 2017, is too big, but I feel like the face is more expressive than past efforts, with better underlying bone structure and the most distinct lips I’ve managed yet.
A less successful experiment, I think, was positioning Jesus’ hands closer together, with his arms less extended and more straight up. (I also tried flat hands again, also unsuccessfully.) Trying out a more acute angle for the arms is something I’ve thought about for a while, but I’ve decided a wider angle is more dramatic. (Not as wide apart, though, as my 2014 effort, which raises the head directly over the intersection of the two beams!)
I made no effort this year to give the cross any wood-grain texture, or even to differentiate the elevation of the two beams—I was too tired. I also felt that the flat cross showed up better against the rough background pattern around the work created with a landscape rake borrowed from my sister. I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not to include a titulus (the plaque bearing the initialization INRI, for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”). No titulus this year.
Among the many responses from passersby, my son Nathan was particularly tickled by that of a jogger at a point when the work was about halfway complete. Slowing down without quite stopping, he murmured under this breath, “Dope as f***, man … cool as shit.” And I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to an older man who said genially, “I hope this is picked up by government satellites, so that they know they’re under assault!”
This year’s sculpture took over four hours—longer than the finished work was destined to last before being obliterated by the rising tide! I’m working more carefully these days, and perhaps more slowly in my mid-50s, than I once did.
Several weeks ago I included brief thoughts about ephemeral art in a silly post about text-message poems and Alan Rickman. Jesus talks in the Sermon on the Mount about the folly of building on sand; sculpting in sand, especially below the tide line, might seem even more foolish. In about the time it took me to shape just Jesus’ head, the waves went from lapping Jesus’ feet to shattering his body. (The work was vulnerable along hidden faultlines, as where the collapse in the left thigh mentioned above was recapitulated below by the rising tide.)
Michelangelo, three months before Pope Julius II commissioned him to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed an 11-foot bronze statue of the pope—an immense ordeal that took the sculptor the better part of two years to complete. Less than three years after it was completed, the statue was taken down, sold for scrap, and destroyed! Leonardo’s iconic The Last Supper (in the news lately for quite ephemeral reasons) tragically began deteriorating shortly after its completion.
Frescos, which must be painted quickly and accurately while the plaster is still wet (not entirely unlike a sand sculptor trying to work before the sand dries), last much longer—potentially as long as the wall stands, which, of course, is not forever, what with earthquakes and one thing and another.
The nave of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City is filled with works of art that may appear at first glance to be paintings, but are actually meticulous mosaics. Called “eternal pictures” or “the eternal art form,” mosaics are indeed among the most durable types of art. Still, the original Saint Peter’s Basilica, built by Constantine in the fourth century, was adorned with mosaics of which only fragments now remain, some of which lasted less than 200 years.
Among many other things, Christianity can be considered, in part, as an apprenticeship in detachment. In this world moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal; we have no abiding treasure here. Other great spiritual traditions teach converging lessons. According to the Bhagavad Gita, we have the right to our work, but never to the fruits of our work. The Quran warns against focusing on “the harvest of this world” (Surah 42:20). Sooner or later, all art is ephemeral. We are all sculpting in sand.
I love your explanation of the evolution of your sand sculpture over the years. The technical advances are fascinating, but even more so, the contemplative experience of creating this labor of love. Sola Deus Gloria!
SDG, this is stunning. To me, the sand piece that was partially washed away by the water really stood out. There’s artistic beauty in what was happening—especially as the sea water washes some of the piece away. Beautiful!