Tree in a frame

Tree in a frame, originally uploaded by escher1.

I dashed down to Heysham Head and Half Moon Bay first thing wanting to build a frame that I would make a pebble sculture in the middle of. I knew that there was a fresh rockfall on the cliffs next to where we were last week and that meant that there would be plenty of square edged rock that had not been weathered by the sea. I found that the rock was actually gritstone which I found surprising as it is normally found on the moors and it varied in colour from black, red to silvery grey. I collected as many blocks as I could carry and ferried them to the beach many times. I assembled the frame away from where I was going to build it to try and get an order for the blocks. Once I was happy with the order I moved them to a nice section of sand and started to dig them in. It took a couple of hours to get the balance of the frame right, I collected more and more blocks and discarded many to get the right shape and feel. Many early versions lacked symmetry, form and balance. I started to become aware that the tide was coming in so I needed to crack on. Whilst I was looking for blocks I noticed a nice piece of driftwood that would fit perfectly. I looked for the split pebbles to arrange them in the frame as that was my first intention but I hadn't brought them with me. So I decided on a tree design. Yet more fiddling with the design of the frame followed until I was finally happy and dug them all in. I filled in the outside and then slighlty buried them and swept off the excess sand. I thought that this worked quite well as the sand filled in all the gaps around the blocks. Then I spent a lot more time smoothing out the surface with one eye on the tide. Now I needed to suitable sticks to form the branches and this meant several more trips up to the cliffs until I was happy. I dug them all in a little and smoothed out the sand. By accident there are dark twigs on the left and light ones on the right but looking at the picture now the top two are reversed. How annoying! Then I did lots of sweeping and pernickety sand cearing to finish of it. I am very pleased with the result.