This Artist Would Have Sand in Her Shoes--if She Wore Any

‘She had more sand in her than any girl I ever see;

in my opinion she was just full of sand.’

--Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

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A jogger stops to stare down, mouth slack, face slick with sweat. He watches awhile, smiles a little--and trots on.

A rising tide pushes the waves closer. Gulls scream for their supper. Couples pause, then wander off.

Sandy Feet doesn’t even glance up. She’s on her haunches, mixing the wet sand, both darkened arms sunk to the elbows in a salty pool. The stout sandman she’s crafting clutches a gritty flower to his belly.

“I just get entranced,” Sandy Feet confesses, peering from beneath her safari hat. “I don’t see anything else. I just get in the flow.”

An English Teacher From Michigan

It’s been 20 years since the former English teacher from Grand Rapids, Mich., moved to South Texas and built her first sand castle. A few years later, she ditched her white-collar gig, moved off the mainland and declared herself a sand sculptor.

Sandy Feet is 42 now, and dark as dried seaweed. Her toes, as advertised, are dusted with grit, adorned with silver rings.

“Everybody knows her,” says Gerry Kirk, a teacher of sand sculpting who lives in San Marcos, Calif. “She’s right in the middle of sand sculpture.”

Surreal Sand a Specialty

Sand artist, yes--but forget plastic buckets and seashell decorations, finger dribbling and soggy moats. This is sand, Andy Warhol-style.

Her sculptures are tall, smooth, often surreal. Dark dreamscapes are spritzed with pop icons. In a piece titled “Que suis je” (What am I),” a faceless woman curls on a rock, contemplating a wall of masks.

During a Las Vegas contest, Sandy Feet rendered Mona Lisa as the Queen of Hearts and Elvis as Botticelli’s Venus, then mixed the Las Vegas skyline into a takeoff on Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

The works of Sandy Feet are preserved in photographs because, of course, nothing made of sand can last.

“These sculptors are really mavericks in the art world,” Kirk says. “It’s a pure art form in that it’s not something that can be hauled around--it’s just a great image.”

The way Sandy Feet sees it, she’s flouting physics.

“It’s altitude--you throw sand up in the air and get it to stay there long enough to carve it,” she says. “You push it until it’s almost going to fall down.”

She wasn’t christened Sandy Feet. Nor was her neighbor, ex-husband and sand-sculpting business partner born Amazin’ Walter. They began life as Lucinda Wierenga and Walter McDonald. But times change.

“She used to sit on the towel and say, ‘No, I’m not creative, I’ll just mess it up,’ ” says Amazin’ Walter. “After much coaxing, she finally crawled over.”

Daydreaming on the Dunes

That was in the early 1980s, halcyon times for the sand-caked hippie chick and her nomadic neighbor, a former newspaper photographer from Orange, Texas. Entire afternoons were spent daydreaming on frayed towels and boozing in the dunes. Salt streaked their cheeks; the sun blackened their skin.

The island was young then. So were Sandy and Walter. This was before the hotels and condominiums cluttered the shoreline with steel, before the back roads were paved, before tourists crowded the margarita bars.

Before Walter and Sandy grew up and became, somehow, respectable. The couple wed in 1990, then changed their minds in time for a 1992 divorce.

“This was just a sleepy little party town, dirt roads and drinking,” recalls Walter, sweeping an arm at a row of glimmering high-rises. “We were just being rowdy. We never thought you could make any money doing this.”

They were wrong. Glancing around a living room cluttered with driftwood, seashells and candles, Sandy Feet grins.

“I work real hard at not having a job,” she says.

The suntanned entrepreneur has found more than a few ways to wring dollars from sand. She’s written two books, peddles sand-whittling tools she designs and oversees a Web site, Sand Castle Central. Giving a bat mitzvah? Consider a Sandy Feet centerpiece--a durable alternative to drippy ice penguins.

She teaches tourists to sculpt fortresses, at $50 a session. She gives lessons in sandy architecture at corporate retreats. She can coax a palace out of even the clumsiest pair of hands. The lessons always start the same.

“First you dig a hole,” she says, swinging her spade. “Dig till you hit the water.”

With bony fingers, Sandy Feet jiggles the sand, just so, forcing the water and clay to bond into tight bricks. Walter and Sandy don’t believe in pounding the sand--she sneers at the “bucket thumpers” who “brutalize their sand.”

The pair founded a loose group of sand sculptors, Sons of the Beach. On the South Texas shores, the pack is easy to spot: Look for the hand-painted safari hats and a gaggle of admiring onlookers.

As for Walter and Sandy, the onetime couple continue to swap sculpting tips and students, to travel the globe together and collaborate on larger-than-life competition pieces.

Contests in Europe, Japan

Sand contests have taken Sandy Feet to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and Japan. It’s a good deal: The artists don’t spend a dime to travel, and prizes climb into the thousands.

True, there’s no security--no retirement plan, no health insurance, no weekly paycheck.

No problem, says Sandy Feet. She can pull down $40,000 in a good year. Moreover, she can sleep late, have a leisurely stretch and meander off to work in a bikini.

“I haven’t been to a doctor since I lost my health insurance,” she says with a chuckle. “I feel so lucky.”

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On the Net:

https://www.sandyfeet.com

https://www.sandcastlecentral.com