Wilhelm Busch - sand sculpture

I really should have documented this sculpture before my last post but I just couldn't think of anything interesting to write about it. I still can't, but it deserves to be covered. I also wanted my first post on Hive to be nice and I knew this one just wouldn't cut the mustard. For those of you who are new to my work, I have set myself the mission of documenting over 25 years of ephemeral sculptures that I've made and had reached over 130 posts since I joined Steem. Now I am continuing my mission and will be adding them to the Hive blockchain. I will still post on Steem for now because there is still an audience and I don't think Hive is ready for exclusive content creators just yet unless you write about Hive or are on one of the big guys autovote list. That's just the way it is but I hope that will change soon as more realise that diverse content is what is needed for Hive to succeed. I am around half way through my work and this piece is from 2008.

illustrating an illustrator

Wilhelm Busch was a famous German illustrator, poet, painter and humorist and although I don't know much about him he apparently he was a great influence in the world of comic books.

This piece is called a demo pile, meaning it is just a teaser of what people should expect from the rest of the exhibition. To be honest from most of the ones I have been a part of they are usually pretty awful and a waste of a pile of sand.

The organisers want to include lots of different elements and usually some logos too which are from the sponsors of the project. All this leads to the sculpture looking like a big decorated cake with no rhyme or reason. For this one luckily we didn't have Logos but we did have many elements to include which were of different scales and seemed to make no sense together.

For me I used this demo as a warm up for the main piece I was here to make The Devil's Mill

Never send a sculptor to do an illustrators job.

I made this piece along with Martijn Rijerse, Kevin Crawford and Jino van Bruinessen. We divided and conquered and stuck in all the elements required. Most of them based on illustrations from Busch's books. Being not to familiar with them I was really carving blind.

I started with Martijn on the big caveman like character. We very quickly realised we had made his head too big and spent the rest of our time trying to overcome this problem we created. We had no time to recarve his massive loaf and so just went with the flow and added the other elements where they fit.

Moving down we could separate and take different areas to populate. I made the big train which I had to morph to fit into the soft sand below and fill the front of the sculpture.

Martijn worked on the other side making some nice delicate illustrations from Max and Moritz, one of Busch's famous publications.

Kevin and Jino did what they do best on the other part of the sculpture, making some castles and fairy tale stuff. Although it was all very nice, the sculpture had no overall composition and was really only a montage of stuff. I think all of us were just putting in the hours, short as they were to fill this pretty big piece with stuff and things.

I don't think the piece really did justice for Wilhelm Busch. From all accounts he was amazing at what he did but for us carvers having to translate his flat wood block illstrations into three dimensional sand sculptures was destined to failure.

There was however one element that I did that I think is noteworthy. That little character I made to the left of the train. Yes, the little flat guy with this back to the audience holding a knife. It was nothing special in the sea of nonsense but when I look back on it now it was a seed of an idea which became one of my favourite sculpture many years later based on Alice in Wonderland. Here's a sneak peak.

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Ps

Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.

The Devil's Mill - sand sculpture

Forklifting - Sand sculpture

Gráinne Ní Mháille (The Pirate queen) - sand sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite

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