The ocean shore, with its crystal blue sky, deep waves, and smooth sand, has often been a place of fascination and inspiration for art. Many people like to bring its beauty home and arrange shells over mirrors, picture frames, lamps, and other objects to remind them of the ocean. From photographs, paintings and drawings of the coast to jewelry that is made from shells and pearls, the seaside has provided an artistic outlet for many. But perhaps one of the most recent and fascinating forms of beach-inspired craft is sand art.
Ilana Yahav from Israel performs a contemporary style of art called sand animation. She applies sand to a surface illuminated on a big screen and then uses her hands to shape and move the sand into images. None of the art stays for long. She quickly forms, erases and recreates images to tell a story to the audience, leaving a beautiful and powerful impact—if only momentary. Yahav’s ability to create something with her hands, coupled with the simplicity and temporariness of her designs, are what make them so exciting.
On her website Yahav says that she always looks for new ways of “expressing the range of human emotions,” and that her early childhood experiences drew her close to the sand as a form of art. She remembers playing on the shores of the Mediterranean during her childhood and explains, “I would draw a personal story, a kind of living diary in the sand. I would draw quickly, trying to finish it all before the wave would come and wipe everything out. I was totally spellbound. I would stand and watch until the drawing disappeared, realizing that everything is transient and temporary…”
Another sand artist, Andres Amador, a San Francisco native, calls himself an “earthscape painter.” He creates breathtaking, gigantic, and elaborate beach murals by raking the sand during a low tide. The color contrast between the wet sand he unearths and the untouched dry sand helps him to “draw” onto the sand. He started out drawing geometric shapes, deriving inspiration from ancient architecture. Now Amador focuses more on designs inspired by the natural world around him.
Amador believes that the focus of earthscape painting should be on the process of making the art, and not on the end product. He also notes that he used to create sculptures and would fill his garage with the many things he had no use for but wanted to keep. He says with this beach art it is different, saying, “With this I get to take photos, but I can let all of it go, and there’s a big lesson in that.” And perhaps the ephemeral quality to his work also enriches the art, making it more fragile, more delicate, and ultimately more beautiful.
In an interview after completing one of his pieces of art, Amador is quoted saying, “The art that I did today, it is going to be washed away, it is not going to last, but through my own experience of happiness, everyone who watched feels happy.” He thinks that the happiness from his art can spread around the world, little by little. He claims, “The image might inspire something, that a little bit of impact will occur, where I think, I really do feel that it has ongoing cumulative quality of shifting the consciousness.”
Amador says that people ask him why he makes art that is going to wash away in a matter of hours. He responds, “Life is not going to last, nothing we will do will last, and so the question becomes: why do anything? What is the endearing value in anything that we do? All that really matters is that we are living life in joy, in a joyous way…where we feel we are invigorated and our souls shines even brighter…why wouldn’t we do that, even if it is something that is going to wash away.”
The importance of the type of art that Yahav and Amador create is its ability to embrace the present, to relinquish its hold on the past, and especially its grope toward the future. The innovators remind their audiences that the beauty of art is not in its ability to last, but in its ability to inspire and invoke powerful thoughtful changes in the minds of individuals and society.