Vancouver Island’s Grittiest Art Show…
The Parksville Beach Festival
It’s the kind of setting that inspires world record accomplishments…a
remarkable spot where the Emerald Sea meets the uninhibited shoreline,
where the sands of time spark creative ingenuity. It’s a place where
intricate sculptures rise from the seaside in the form of space ships
and dinosaurs and mythical gods. And the artistic souls who beget
these monoliths of the sand strive to make them bigger, or at the very
least better than anywhere else. Such is the Parksville Beach Festival
& World Class Sand Sculptor Competition every summer in August.
The Parksville Beach Festival is basically a resurrection of the old
International Sand Castle Competition of a few years ago. It has since
become more family oriented and spread over a longer period of time.
Where everything happened in one weekend of revelry, where the tides
swept away the hard work of sand artists in an afternoon of shifting
seas, sculptures are now created above the tide line and are on
display for two weeks at a more moderate level of frivolity. This
means the sand is brought in now.
Each team gets 14 yards of sand to work (or is that play) with, and
soloists get 10. As it turns out, sand is one of the few materials
where a yard happens to measure a ton. Add it all up and you get
248,000 lbs. of the finest, most malleable grains of natural quartz
around, an unlikely artistic medium with a surprisingly sophisticated
outcome.
Judging the competition is a panel of three to five judges (an odd
number so there’s no threat of a tie) comprised of previous
competitors, organizers and those with a strong art background.
Judging is based on structural difficulty, artistic ability, use of
space, if it looks as though it’s defying gravity, and how well the
competitors entertain or interact with the crowds who flock to this
gritty event.
With the level of artistic ability on the West Coast, the end results
have hardly been simple. Themes have run the gamut from Star Wars and
Jurassic Park to the Jungle Book, and a memorable creation of Marilyn
Monroe and Elvis in a ’57 Chevy convertible being pulled over by a
motorcycle cop.
What can you say about an art form where you turn billions of single
grains of quartz into a cohesive masterpiece of sand, sweat and
artistic vision? Maybe "I'm King of the World!" from the top of your
30 foot tall sand castle.