Sand Sculpturing a Crumbling Experience at the Fair

One of the most spectacular pieces of artwork at the Ventura County Fair will be destroyed hours after the fair’s final day.

Just inside the main entrance, sand sculptor Alan Matsumoto of Roanoke, Va., was finishing his 10-foot-tall work Monday after a week of work.

Matsumoto used 25 tons of construction sand donated by a local contractor. The sculpture is held together by nothing more than the right amount of water. “It’s a very forgiving medium,” Matsumoto said. “It’s easy to work with.”

Matsumoto’s toolbox contains kitchen utensils, art supplies, carpentry and masonry tools, a cake icing spreader, shovels, pallet knives, a compass and homemade implements.

Between April and November, Matsumoto travels from fair to fair, building up to a dozen sandcastles a year. When it’s winter in this part of the world, he sculpts in the warm Southern Hemisphere, or creates snow sculptures at ski resorts in exchange for skiing.

After Ventura, he will move on to shows in Oregon and Alaska before defending his California-based company’s sculpting title at the world championships in Vancouver.

“Each one is totally different,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a bit of a surprise what actually gets carved. Many times we just wing it.”

In Ventura, fair officials asked him to sculpt a large version of the fair’s poster, which depicts a Ferris wheel and fireworks. Rendering a two-dimensional poster in three dimensions is more difficult than creating a unique 3-D sculpture, Matsumoto said. Figuring out how to depict fireworks in three dimensions was especially difficult, he said.

“I had waking moments on that,” Matsumoto said. But “the hardest part has been these letters,” he said of the wording below the main design. Matsumoto also added his own designs of pencils and scissors around the main poster area.

For 19 years, Matsumoto worked as an engineer, designing bridges, buildings and pipelines. One day while building a sandcastle at the beach, someone asked if he would like to build them professionally. Now, rather than wearing a suit and tie, he spends his workdays in shorts and a T-shirt, barefoot in the sand.

The sand for the Ventura sculpture turned out to be coarser than he was used to. To compensate, Matsumoto and his wife, Robin, used a window screen to sift out the bigger pebbles so only fine sand remained, which makes for smoother surfaces.

Some of the sand’s coarseness comes in handy, however, when Matsumoto sprays the fireworks design with water to reveal small stones, which makes the area seem a little brighter.

Matsumoto answers questions for the many visitors who watch his progress.

“Most people would rather see it being done than the finished product,” he said. “The image appears in a really short time. They can actually see how it develops over a period of days.”

Musicians Vanessa and Mike Hester, who entertain visitors entering the fairgrounds, have the perfect spot to watch Matsumoto. “To me, it’s spectacular seeing him work on it,” Vanessa said. “I had no idea what it was going to be. I’m surprised at how much he does in a day.”

While Matsumoto’s company, Sandscapes of Los Osos in San Luis Obispo County, has sent sculptors to Ventura for several years, this marked his fourth time at the fair.

“This is one of the best venues I have,” Matsumoto said. He takes pride in his work, but isn’t bothered by its temporary nature. “My enjoyment is in the carving of it,” he said. “I take a picture, and that’s enough for me.”

Matsumoto’s work will remain on display through Sunday, the last day of the fair. After that, “it just gets knocked down and cleaned up,” said fair publicist Devlin Raley, adding that the sand is moved to Morgan Arena, a horse and livestock exhibition area at Seaside Park. “It is, without a doubt, one of the most depressing days of the year.”

Left untouched, the sculpture could last several weeks, “birds and vandals notwithstanding,” Matsumoto said. But Matsumoto would rather the fair destroy his work.

“That way they have to have me come back and do another one,” he said.

And Matsumoto has no lack of an audience to review his work.

Sunday marked the largest single-day attendance at the Ventura County Fair since 1987, when the event was moved from October to August, organizers said. A total of 35,456 people passed through the gates at Seaside Park, Raley said. Since Wednesday’s opening, 110,533 people had visited the fair, he said.

Total attendance through Sunday was up more than 22% over the pace of 2000, although a year ago the carnival did not arrive until a few days after the fair started. Still, total fair attendance through Sunday is about 1,500 ahead of the 1999 pace.

Raley attributed the larger crowds to good weather and to the popular musical group Los Tucanes de Tijuana, which performed Sunday.