Spend a day at the beach with Jane Dunlop-Stevenson for Hands Across the Sands, a fundraiser for the Queens County Food Bank on Sunday at Summerville Beach. (Rick Conrad
You can help turn a day at the beach into a work of art this weekend, and raise some money for a local charity.
The idea is to draw 30-foot tall stick figures on the beach at low tide. You make a $20 donation to the Queens County Food Bank for each figure. And Dunlop-Stevenson and other volunteers will help you bring your beach art into the world.
“It started with a gentleman saying to me it would be neat to see people being drawn on the beach,” Dunlop-Stevenson said in a recent interview.
“And that led me to think of a picture of all these stick people and what we could do with it and it just evolved into let’s charge some money and help out the food bank and create this great picture.
“The original goal was to draw 150 30-foot stick figures at $20 a piece which would then (be) $3,000 to the food bank. We’re at a third of that right now. So that’s really good. I’m pleased with that. Just to envision 77 30-foot stick drawings is incredible across the beach, all holding hands, … with their feet in the water. It’ll be really neat to see the tide coming in and touching their toes.”
After everybody has drawn their figures, Dunlop-Stevenson will take drone footage of the whole scene and post it.
This is the first time she’s created sand art at Summerville with so many other people. But she’s a veteran virtuoso at creating striking short-term sand art.
Probably her best known work was a 120-foot-by-60-foot tribute to Olympic shot putter Sarah Mitton before this summer’s games. That one featured an 85-foot Eiffel Tower, a Canadian flag and the Olympic rings.
Dunlop-Stevenson created this tribute to Sarah Mitton this summer at Summerville Beach. (Jane Stevenson photo)
She’s also recreated the logo for the Liverpool International Theatre Festival. And she’s taken small groups to Summerville to create mandalas and other images.
But Sunday’s event promises to be her biggest group effort yet. She and some other volunteers will sketch out the heads of all the stick figures ahead of time.
And participants just have to bring their own rakes to help give their pieces texture, so that they show up against the smooth sand.
“And they will rake the head and choose their design however they want it, however simple or dressed up they want their little person to be, it’s totally up to them. No perfection is necessary. If you have your little picture drawn and you know what you want to put in the sand, it will probably take you 20 minutes maybe to draw a stick figure. So it’s very possible to draw a few.
“Nothing has to be perfect. It’s all just for fun and to see this really cool art.”
Dunlop-Stevenson has set up a Facebook event, which includes a link to a Google registration form. You can go by yourself or get a team of five together.
Liverpool artist Jane Stevenson created this tribute to Sarah Mitton on Wednesday in the sand at Summerville Beach. (Jane Stevenson photo)
For most people, a day at the beach might involve some swimming or lounging on the sand.
For Jane Stevenson, a day at the beach involves creating a 120-by-60-foot piece of sand art as a tribute to Olympic shot putter Sarah Mitton.
The Liverpool artist’s creation on Summerville Beach featured an 85-foot Eiffel Tower with a Canadian flag in the middle and the Olympic rings at the base, with Paris 2024 on one side and “Go Sarah!” on the other.
“She’s a friend and she’s a marvellous person,” Stevenson says of Mitton, who is from Brooklyn.
“I’m enjoying drawing in the sand and I thought what a great thing to be able to do. So I started with the rings one day and I thought that’s not enough. So I stuck a little Eiffel Tower on it and looked at it at home and said that’s not good enough. So, four more tries and not succeeding. Finally, new strategies and a little more homework on the design, on the fifth try, it all came together.”
Stevenson created it in about two and a half hours late Wednesday afternoon.
“It’s gone far and wide, so that’s kind of cool. And lovely comments about it. So that’s really nice too. People really enjoyed the picture and the sentiment behind it. It was fun.
“That’s the most far-reaching anything I ever do will get. So that’s quite a compliment to have them want to do that with it. So I’m pleased with that, it’s more than I thought would happen with it.”
It was Stevenson’s fifth time trying to get her design down in the sand, after plotting it out precisely on paper.
“The first one went down on the sand on the 27th of July, so between then and yesterday I finally got it right.”
She and her husband Garth used a very long tape measure and a homemade compass to plot out the basic lines of the piece. And then she used a rake to fill in the detail of the Eiffel Tower and the Olympic rings.
Stevenson says that she used the drone only once as she was putting it together.
“Just eyed it. Did it by eye. My lines and my paper that I was going off of were really precise and then we really measured precisely this last time. I had my homework really well done on the fifth try. And then you can just can tell visually that it looks alright. It was math, and drawn lines.”
Stevenson has created eye-popping pieces of public art before, most recently for a Privateer Days parade float for the Mersey Rose Theatre Company. That featured a huge tea party set for the company’s upcoming production of Alice in Wonderland Jr. She’s also created displays for the Astor Theatre, including a life-sized Barbie doll package.
She’s done six or seven other beach art pieces this summer, but this one was the biggest and most complicated. She started at 4 in the afternoon near low tide and finished it around 6:30, racking up about 50,000 steps along the way.
“I thought I’d won the gold medal, the gold medal in the Olympic sand drawing. It was a very good feeling to get the result I wanted.
“This was fun to do. I really wanted it to work for Sarah. … Not bad for a day at the beach.”
She’s not sure if Mitton has seen it yet, but she knows her mother Bonnie has. Stevenson says she’ll be at home on Friday afternoon cheering on Mitton as she goes for gold.
Mitton qualified for the final on Thursday with her first throw, which was also the farthest in the field.
“On the edge of our seats. She’s looking pretty good. This morning it looked effortless for her. She qualified so easily. I have good feelings for her tomorrow. I think she’ll do well. She’s worked hard, she’s ready.”
Stevenson says she appreciates all the positive feedback she’s received on her beach sand tribute.
“Thank you to everybody who has commented on it. That means a lot as well that they have enjoyed it so. That’s made it even more worthwhile. And, go Sarah!”
