Last year was the first time I had ever participated in the Piccolo Spoleto Sand Sculpture Competition in Charleston, SC. You can find a post about that by scrolling to last June. This year, our team agreed to regroup and spend the day having fun again.
This year's event fell on the Saturday before my family vacation instead of the Saturday after. Cathryn and Elena worked in some short family vacations around the event again this year. Katherine also got a little break from everyday life by going down a day early. Violet and I did the same, we just did it with a week's worth of luggage, a kayak and a surfboard loaded in with all the sand sculpture supplies. We all assembled from our various locations on Front Beach on The Isle of Palms and got ready for battle.
This is us with our battle faces on. Elena can't take a "mean mug" photo to save her life. Catch her on a random Tuesday and she'll be giving you the most evil eye by accident, but ask her to mean mug and she instantly starts laughing and smiling. Luckily, the faces weren't as important as the sculpting skills and these ladies are some of the best sculptors I know.
First, some background about the weather. It started raining in my area about two weeks before the event and my rotation of running shoes almost never dried out. The daily threat of rain continued as we drove down to Charleston and the forecast for the morning of the competition was for heavy rain and storms. The night before the event, the organizers sent out an email warning that if lightning was in the area, the event would be canceled. When I got up to run, there was no cancelation email and no rain, so I was very happy.
Katherine was the original organizer of our team and she's a meticulous planner. I am the opposite of a meticulous planner, at least on the surface. I actually do a lot of planning and thinking through ideas, but I do it in a way that makes sense for my brain and my knowledge of my limitations. I also keep all of it to myself. Still, these two opposing planning forces usually work together well to bring us right into the middle of those two extremes. Katherine kept teasing me, asking in the group chat if I had a sketch for everyone yet. Well, the night before the event, sitting on a hotel bed, I drew and sent this one:
After viewing the entries last year, I wanted us to go for scale and make something big. I joked with Elena that we should make a giant portrait of her step dad Gene. That got me thinking about doing a human head since none of the entries were attempting anything like that last year. It was last minute-ish, but it was a plan and a sketch.
The first step is always to pile up a lot of sand. We spent about an hour shoveling sand, packing sand, and hauling 5 gallon buckets from the ocean and pouring the water over the packed sand.
With only two hours left in the competition, we began sculpting. I started trying to lay out the face and the rest of the team began working on the much larger area that would become the flowing hair of the sand princess we were making.
I was really concerned that we might be cold during the competition. I've been stuck on the beach making sculptures in rainy conditions before and your body can get quite cold. Since the rain never showed up, the temperatures stayed higher and the humidity was like a big, wet blanket making us all very warm and very sweaty.
Carving faces is not something I do very often and it's very difficult to make your brain understand that you have to keep digging out areas deeper and deeper. It seems counter-intuitive as you're working and you have to be really bold. Being bold in sand means a high level of risk. This kind of risk on a very public beach is a very public risk. The last thing I wanted was for the whole face to fall off because I was being dumb. We all did a good job with the packing, though, so the face didn't fall off, even when I kept digging out around the eyes and nose.
In our pregame discussions, we had some ideas for turning the locks of hair into snakes or mermaid tails. Because we knew we were taking a big bite with the very large scale, we agreed to prioritize the face and hair before worrying about details like snakes or tails.
This proved to be a wise choice as we started to run out of time before all the hair strands were even in existence. There were about 30 minutes of manic shoveling and sculpting just to get everything to a finished state before the competition ended at noon. We were rushing and sweating, but we still used our final seconds to rake out the area and add a title and some musical notes.
As soon as time ran out, we all went for a cool off in the ocean. It felt sooooo nice.
While we didn't have Jencyn as one of our good luck charms this year, we did have Violet and we had Cathryn's parents again. We also had Elena's mom, Tesa again. This year we added Elena's step dad, Gene, who provided some comic relief while we worked. I got tickled after we got out of the ocean when Gene asked Elena to take his photo with our finished sculpture.
It was nice to have Katherine with us this year. She helped us be able to make such a large sculpture in 3 hours. It's kinda funny because we usually butt heads in the beginning of a project, but after that, we work together pretty well. Our fussing is usually entertaining to others.
After our dip in the ocean, we walked around and checked out the competition. There were some really good family teams and some really talented kids making sculptures this year. When we talked to the judges, they asked us our team name. We told them we were "The Hot Metal Beaches". I eventually had to explain the team name to some journalists by saying that these ladies were my current and former students who also just happened to be exceptional metal sculptors. Then we gathered around the tent for the awards presentation.
We were announced as winning second place overall!
This was our finished sculpture...
...and a closer view of the sculpture and the award sign...
...and our award ribbon that will go with our ribbon collection in my office.
Then it was past time for lunch! Working very hard for 3 hours had us all very hungry so we got to the Windjammer as soon as we possibly could.
We were past "hangry" and very close to delirious at this point. I hope she'll forgive me for posting this photo but I absolutely love making Elena laugh this hard. There are no photos of the food because it was devoured immediately. The grouper was amazing, but again, I was famished.
I said earlier that these ladies are some of the best sculptors I know. I realize it's easy to dismiss such a comment as just being kind and praising my students and friends. I'm a nice guy, but I'm not that nice and I don't lie about art. Let me provide some evidence to support my claims: Katherine is the most decorated (awarded) art student in Lander University history, racking up many national level exhibits and awards while she was still a student. Her success has continued since earning her MFA, continuing to win national awards, getting her work accepted into prestigious exhibits and having solo shows. Cathryn earned Best In Show in our student exhibit last year for her sculpture and recently won 1st Place overall in a regional collegiate exhibit for her steel sculpture. Elena also has some regional awards for her work and just last week won Best In Show in a national juried exhibit of metal work in Virginia. All three of them had steel sculptures accepted into that exhibit (Katherine had two accepted!). So, like I said, some of the best sculptors I know. It seems I was lucky to be on a sand sculpture team with them, huh?
They're also a lot of fun to be around. Mama B took some "after" photos for us to go with our "before" photos at the very top of this post.
And this is how we felt physically after working so hard and winning a major award. I can't adequately describe how tiring something like this is. Sand is heavy and we piled it 5 feet high. 5 gallon buckets of water are heavy and we hauled so many of those from the ocean and dumped them on the sand. Then there was the relentless stomping on the sand with our feet and carving it away with our hands. We were absolutely exhausted, but our goal for the day was to have fun and we definitely had fun.
And then for reasons I can't explain, we needed to go have our photo made with a yellow flamingo.
With a crew this fun, it was tempting to stick around with them longer. They had plans to go to thrift stores and have dinner together. By this time, though, it was after 3:00 pm and Violet and I were late for vacation! We said our goodbyes and started driving up the coast to meet the family in time for dinner.
