
DATE: Thursday, June 12, 1997               TAG: 9706120446

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   90 lines

SCULPTURES IN SAND TAKE SHAPE FOR BOARDWALK ART SHOW AT BEACH

From browsing vacationers to hotel clerks, Boardwalk denizens on Wednesday were wondering what in the name of art was going on at 31st Street.

Rising from the sand were a 210-foot-long salamander mound, a cluster of up-ended red buoys and two giant gourds made of chain-link fencing.

``What is this - a sandcastle contest?'' asked Billy Martin, who was renting Wave Runners a block south of the commotion.

``It looks like some kind of a ramp, like for Evel Knievel,'' said Mike Sienda, a vacationer from Alexandria.

``Everybody's asking what the red stakes are. What is it?'' queried Syd Simpson, a desk clerk at Days Inn on 31st.

The short answer: Sculpture has been created and installed on one block of beach for one week only as part of the Boardwalk Art Show & Festival.

The core of the weeklong event, sponsored by the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, is the 42nd annual Boardwalk Art Show. Starting today, 380 artists display their work from 17th to 31st streets. The outdoor show and sale is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily through Sunday.

The sculptures, ``Monuments at the Water's Edge,'' were built by three reputable artists - Steven Bickley of Blacksburg, John Ruppert of Baltimore and Raymond Saa Stein of Brooklyn.

They started work on Monday, and by Wednesday were sunburned and bedraggled. The trio looked more like a construction crew than esteemed art professors.

Midmorning, Bickley and Saa Stein found their way to the roof of Days Inn to get a fresh perspective on their work, and to photograph it.

``Yeah, I'm off a little bit,'' said Bickley, eyeing the 200-foot tail of his salamander effigy mound, shaped from tons of sand. He could see where the tail was a tad crooked.

Saa Stein liked what he saw. He had made 20 easel-like wooden structures, painted them red, wrapped the ``noses'' in foam rubber, and buried them nose down in the sand.

To Saa Stein, they looked like buoys washed ashore - like the Cuban refugees whose plight inspired this work.

From their bird's-eye view, the artists watched Ruppert as he struggled to install the second of three 12-foot-tall gourd forms made of chain-link fencing.

``It's nice seeing all of our pieces together,'' Saa Stein said, musing over the vision. ``Somehow, it becomes a collaboration. It almost becomes a gallery in the sand.''

Back on the beach, Ruppert complained that a lack of volunteers had slowed installation. He also felt the works would have looked better if they had been spaced farther apart.

``But, we have to remember this is a festival. And you get into the spirit of it,'' he conceded.

The spirit of improvisation, that is.

As per usual, Ruppert invented the engineering for his sculptures as he went along. For his ``Beach Balls,'' he climbed down into his fencing cylinders, set up the infrastructure from the inside, pushed out the form, then slipped out a slender opening at the top.

One of the gourds appeared to be precariously close to the water's edge. The tide, in fact, was drooling on it.

But Ruppert wasn't worried that his art would set sail. ``It weighs at least 1,000 pounds.''

Meanwhile, Bickley was having trouble packing the dry sand on the sides of his earth mound, which he titled ``Peewaukee Effigy'' after a town in Wisconsin that boasts several salamander mounds.

An effigy mound, he explained, is a dirt mound shaped like and honoring an animal. They were built by American Indians during prehistoric times.

``To me, it's a large, mysterious archetype,'' Bickley said. ``At this scale, it has such a presence that people have to be curious about it.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

TAMARA VONINSKI/The Virginian-Pilot

Artist Steve Bickley has created what he calls ``Peewaukee Effigy,''

representing an Indian mound, at 31st Street on the Oceanfront.

Works by him and two other artists are ``Monuments at the Water's

Edge.''

Graphic

DETAILS

What: A weeklong festival at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront that

includes:

42nd Annual Boardwalk Art Show: 380 artists from across the

nation set up from 17th to 31st streets. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

today through Sunday.