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Ephemeral art artists7/24/2023 Your works are extremely linearly precise. I don’t need to goose it up by calling it “sacred” because it is just naturally that. The work relates to the Fibonacci sequence and what some people would call “sacred geometry”, although for me it’s a pure form of meditation. One day I was doing a series of spirals and another day I was doing a figurative drawing and someone came to me on the latter and asked: “Where’s that fantastic spiral?” It’s an odd thing to create work in a public space, where it’s always visible, and observe people’s desire to be critical or appreciative. I was curious about what was possible but I still enjoy both equally. You gradually shifted your focus from figurative drawings to geometric abstraction. It’s been thousands and thousands of miles of walking. I was drawing on the sand at every single low tide for many years. I quickly became obsessed with the process. I was intrigued with the idea of physically exhausting myself and drawing until I filled the beach, or until the tide was coming up. I covered the entire beach-a pretty substantial area encompassing somewhere between 70 to 100 sq. The fish was an extension of my interest in making whimsical drawings. Jim Denevan: Most of what I do is on the whimsical side. The Art Newspaper: The documentary begins with you recalling the first “sand drawing” that you made on a beach in California in 1994-the outline of a fish. Installation by Jim Denevan, Single Line Spiral, Tunitas Creek Beach, CA (2011). Outstanding in the Field is holding a six-location European tour this summer, which began this week in an Italian sustainable farm in Grosseto and will feature temporary artworks made by both Denevan alone and with collaborators. His work has also been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Parrish Art Museum, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Vancouver Sculpture Biennial.ĭenevan’s artistic and culinary trajectory was the subject of the documentary Man in the Field: The Life and Art of Jim Denevan that was released late last year and directed by the California-based director Patrick Trefz. “It’s about the thing in and of itself.”ĭenevan’s work was included in the Faena Festival’s 2019 programming coinciding with Art Basel in Miami Beach, where the artist created a 360-seat circular table symbolic of the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Denevan “recreates himself and recreates his art -it’s not about ego”, Fox says. Several photographs and other materials from Denevan’s archive were recently acquired by the Nevada Art Museum’s Center for Art and Environment, a research centre that holds one of the most comprehensive collections of art in natural and built environments that is spearheaded by the scholar William Fox. While Denevan was previously best-known for the cult dining experiences that he has held since the late 1990s, called Outstanding in the Field, in recent years his compelling and laborious artworks have gained overdue recognition. His monumental site-specific work Angle of Repose was a major highlight of Desert X AlUla’s second edition this year, comprising several concentric pyramidal mounds of various sizes that surreally altered the desert landscape. The California-based artist Jim Denevan has created unfathomably symmetrical ephemeral “paintings” on the sand since the mid-1990s, using a stick or rake to draw sometimes miles-long geometric and Fibonacci-inspired compositions.
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