|
|
      |
 |
|
Artists Mold Dreams From Grains of Sand
 | | Grant L. Gursky | | Mark Venit touches up a sand castle he built for Dino Scalvounos, who surprised his girlfirend by putting her engagement ring in the castle. |
He builds fairy tales where the land meets the sea. He’s sculpted and molded sands on the shores of six oceans into visions of the Arthurian legend – castles with towers and turrets, spires and moats and soaring arches.
Mark Venit figures he’s built 400 castles in the past 25 years, and, by all accounts, he’s one of the world’s best. Venit, a well-known marketing guru who lives in Ocean Pines, has won three world championships and 40 regional competitions. His creations have earned him $170,000 in prize money and payments for commissioned work ... and God knows how much for Kodak and Fuji, what with all those photos people take.
The magic has never faded. “When people see a sand castle, for a moment, they’re children again,” says Venit, 53. “You think of castles and you think of fairy tales and storybooks – stories that somebody read to you at bedtime. It’s Camelot for one brief moment people will remember. It’s sort of a dreamy perfection.”
Venit and other sand sculptors have transformed the age-old childhood pastime into a sophisticated, if ephemeral, art form. Building castles – and just about anything else you could create with sand – has become all the rage on beaches throughout the world. And we’re not talking the rudimentary stuff children create with their plastic buckets and pint-sized shovels.
Today, sand sculptors vie against one another in regional, national and international competitions with prizes ranging from T-shirts and short trips to thousands of dollars. Between shows, some artists build sculptures for trade shows, sports teams and corporate promotions: a Jeep cruising through the wilds of Africa, a 12-foot-high Wrigley Field, a wonderland of Dr. Seuss characters, a humongous crab.
Artist Randy Hofman aspires to a loftier calling. By shaping the sand, he hopes he’ll help shape souls. Millions of Ocean City vacationers know his work because they’ve stopped to marvel at the Biblical scenes – the Last Supper, Noah and the Ark, the Crucifixion, David and Goliath – that he creates from sand just off the Boardwalk at Second Street.
Hofman, who lives in Ocean Pines, carves beneath his sculptures simple messages like “God loves us all,” “With God, all things are possible,” “All are welcome” and “Thank you, Jesus.” He places placards with quotes from scripture in front of the sculptures and leaves matchbook-sized booklets with excerpts from the Bible and a jar for donations.
But he never foists the message on anyone. “The Holy Spirit is a gentleman,” says Hofman, who also does oil paintings he sells. “God knows when we’re ready to receive the word. Maybe it’s this year; maybe it’s next year.”
He loves watching the children when they encounter his sculptures and the messages. “One of the big kicks for me is when I see a parent and a young child, and the kid is saying, ‘Dad, what does that mean?’ And the kid is trying to prod him and get it out. The parents explain to the kids just what these simple messages mean.”
Hofman says a judo class he once took serves him well because it taught him much about balance. “Doing this is really a poetic dance,” he says. “I jump around and climb around these sand sculptures when I’m making them and end up in the oddest positions. I find I sometimes have to do a hop and a twist and a twirl to keep from squashing something, so I have to know how to keep my balance.”
 | | Grant L. Gursky | | Randy Hofman puts the finishing touches on one of the Biblical sand sculptures he builds just off the Boardwalk at Second Street. |
As Hofman can attest, sand sculpting takes more know-how than pounding wet sand it into shapes. And some of the best sand sculptors have created schools with the beach as a classroom where neophytes learn how to wow fellow sunbathers with their creations in the sand.
Lucinda Wierenga – aka world champion sand sculptor Sandy Feet – quit her day job as an English teacher and traded her chalk and textbooks for shovels and trowels to teach her art to others in South Padre Island, Tex. She offers classes for $50 to $125 and teaches everything from creating basic towers and staircases to elaborate castles, animals and human figures.
In Lewes Beach, Del., Lynn McKeowen teaches sand castle-building, but accepts no payment, though she admits an “ulterior motive” – “to turn kids who would be sand castle destroyers into sand castle creators.”
McKeowen, a 56-year-old Lenni, Pa., resident who spends each August with her family at a summer home in Lewes Beach, started teaching her own children to build castles 20 years ago. “When they outgrew it, I just couldn’t stop,” she says.
Today, she builds five-foot-tall castles (and dogs, cats, dragons, elephants and egrets too) on the Delaware Bay beach, and
Sand Castle Tips
Read castle-building
tips from Lynn McKeowen and take a look at photos of some of her castles. The “Sand Castle Lady” has taught hundreds of people to build castles in Lewes, Del. |
teaches others to do the same. Hundreds of fans, students and former students – from throughout the United States and from as far away as Canada, France, Switzerland and Germany – know her as the “Sand Castle Lady” or “Mother Goose.”
“I build these big sand castles, and if anybody says, ‘Wow,’ I stop what I’m doing and try to show them everything I know and encourage them to build something,” McKeowen says. “And before you know it, there’s seven or eight wonderful sand castles on the beach.”
Some families have been coming back every August for years, and the kids love to show off new tricks they’ve learned. Other former students e-mail McKeowen from across the globe. She still recalls the 84-year-old Florida woman who came up for lessons, built her teacher a splendid castle and carved at its base, “To Lynn With Love.”
For Dino Scalvounos, a 31-year-old karate instructor from Wilmington, nothing says love and romance like a sand castle. So when he decided to propose to his girlfriend, Katie DiEgidio, Scalvounos toyed with the idea of building her a sand castle and topping it with a ring.
 | | Remarkable detail distinguishes one of Mark Venit's world-championship sand castles. |
Then he discovered Venit’s name on the Internet and decided to hire the artist to build a castle outside the Carousel in Ocean City, where his girlfriend was staying. Scalvounos surprised DiEgidio during a walk on the beach in late August.
“I said, ‘Look at this sand castle; look at how detailed it is,’” he recalls. Then she spotted the ring in the middle of the tower. “She didn’t move. She had her hands to her face," he says. “I think there’s just something majestic and romantic about sand castles, like a fairytale.”
---------------------
Comments from users:
| KingCastle | Nova Scotia Canada | | kingcastle AT yahoo DOT com | |
Great Stuff!
Rain, Rain Go away! Let us build Sand Castles All Day! |
| |
Other Stories by Gary Gately
Carousel Rebounds, Dazzles Again
Tourney: Big Fish, Big Boats, Big Bucks
OC Sand Artists Share Secrets
More...
More Ocean City Golf Articles
|
|
|
|
