Take a Break: Play with Sand

Today’s post was inspired by a video my husband told me to watch. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” which is saying a lot since he is an artist and taught at the college level.

While I will include the link for the video, it’s the idea of making art with sand that I find most interesting. In the past, I’ve blogged about making a desk top Zen garden, which involves sand. This is great fun and you can spend hours making different shapes and designs using a “rake.”

Since it’s summer and beach time, take a break at the shore, if there is one near you, and make a sand castle. If that’s not a possibility, use sand as a drawing tool.

Find a tray, empty picture frame or something that allows the sand to stay somewhat contained, yet provides enough space to move it around. Now sprinkle a thin layer of sand and start making designs and shapes. Use the sand similar to how you would use finger paints. Don’t have any sand handy? Try salt.

You can do this on-line at Sand Painting. Turn on your favorite channel on Pandora Radio and see how this affects your art.

And now for the video that inspired this post. Kseniya Simonova, the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent, tells stories through sand animation. In this video, she recounts Germany conquering Ukraine in WWII. She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman's face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman's face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

One art critic said: "I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there's surely no bigger compliment."