Sandpainting

In the sandpainting of southwestern Native Americans (the most famous of which are the Navajo [known as the Diné]), the Medicine Man (or Hatałii) paints loosely upon the ground of a hogan, where the ceremony takes place, or on a buckskin or cloth tarpaulin, by letting the coloured sands flow through his fingers with control and skill.

Some Navajo laws and taboos relate to the sandpaintings, and protect their holiness: Indigenous Australian art has a history which covers more than 30,000 years, and a wide range of native traditions and styles.

It is notable for being the first work by an Indigenous Australian artist to win a contemporary art award, and the first public recognition of a Papunya painting.

The mandala sand-painting process begins with an opening ceremony, during which the lamas, or Tibetan priests, consecrate the site and call forth the forces of goodness.

Formed of traditional prescribed iconography that includes geometric shapes and a multitude of ancient spiritual symbols (e.g.: Ashtamangala and divine attributes of yidam), seed syllables, mantra, the sand-painted mandala is used as a tool or instrument for innumerable purposes.

From the 15th century in Japan, Buddhist artists in the times of the shōguns practised the craft of bonseki by sprinkling dry coloured sand and pebbles onto the surface of plain black lacquered trays.

As a fine example of the table deckers' craft, Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, England possesses an ornate folding screen with three panels, decorated with sand pictures protected by glass.

This screen may have been the work of the German artisan F. Schweikhardt, who specialised in still-life studies in the style of the Dutch painter Jan van Huysum.

Sandpainting as a craft was inspired by King George III, who was a skilled watchmaker and craftsman in his own right, and took an interest in the skills demonstrated by royal functionaries, known as Table Deckers, who decorated the white table-cloths at royal banquets with ornate centre-pieces decorated by using unfixed coloured sands and sugars as 'paint', and a bird's feather as a 'brush' a craft introduced by a European traveller who had observed the craftsmen at work in Japan.

This set a number of craftsmen including Haas, Schweikhardt and Benjamin Zobel (Memmingen, Germany, 21 September 1762 – London, England, 24 October 1830), all of German origin, to, independently of each other, successfully develop suitable methods to achieve this goal, and these pictures were commissioned by the royal worthies of the day and became highly prized by the aristocracy.

The King's brother, the Duke of York, commissioned a number of works by Zobel and the others, although the sand artists jealously guarded their method from their competitors.

Zobel depicted "pigs in the manner of Morland"; "Nelson", the favourite dog of the Duke of York; "Tiger after George Stubbs", and an impressive "Vulture and snake.

Haas followed more closely the techniques developed in Japan, but mixing dry powdered gum arabic with the sand, sprinkling the mixture through a sieve and using feathers as brushes to create the pictures upon the baseboard, then fixing them by some method which he kept a secret.

[citation needed] With the passing of these Georgian craftsmen and the disposal of the Duke of York's collection the interest and skills evolved in sand picture work declined.

Colonel Rybot was a keen collector of sand paintings, which were the source material of the articles written on the subject in the arts and crafts magazines of the day.

Eventually 37 of his collection of sand paintings were the main feature at an auction held at Sotheby's New Bond Street gallery on 15 June 1956.

For the tourist the vertical sand cliffs at Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight form the central portion of a visual geological phenomenon (best viewed after a shower of rain) which encapsulates the chalk spires of The Needles and Tennyson Downs.

After her marriage to Prince Albert and having chosen Osborne House near Cowes to be her new family retreat, Queen Victoria was the prime mover in the gentrification of this former backwater, local artisans benefitted from the influx of wealthy visitors, and a number of craftsmen sold their fixed sand pictures and unfixed sand jars featuring views of the Island as unique keepsakes of the Isle of Wight.

Edwin always signed his quaint pictures in a fine hand with a mapping pen and Indian ink, one of his most successful mass-produced subjects being "Collecting birds eggs on Needles Cliffs".

John Dore used a card embellished with a printed border of lace design on which to execute his sand pictures although the quality of his work was inferior to that of his brother.

In the 1860s and 1870s J. Symons of Cowes produced local views much larger than postcard size, mounted in glazed oak or maple frames and signed with the artist's signature on the reverse.

In the 1860s to 1890s, Andrew Clemens, a deaf-mute man born in Dubuque, Iowa, USA became famous for his craft of creating unfixed pictures using multicoloured sands compressed inside glass bottles or ornate chemist jars.

In the province of Drenthe in the Netherlands in the late 19th, early 20th centuries it was custom to use a stiff broom to sweep patterns in white sand to form simple decorations on the tiled floors of the houses, mostly for special occasions or celebrations.

Roger de Boeck, born in 1930, was a well-respected exponent of this craft, who used glue to fix his sand pictures to a suitable base selling them to visitors to his atelier.

[22] Joe Mangrum poured coloured sand from his hand for two consecutive days on 8–9 May 2012 he titled "Asynchronous Syntropy" and an outdoor project that acted as a circumambulation of the museum itself.

Mangrum worked a total of 24 hours over the span of two days, spontaneously improvising his sand painting design, only to have it quickly disappear under the bustle of Columbus Circle foot traffic.

[27][28] Most artists use naturally occurring oxidised and mineral-charged coloured sands, adding powdered charcoal to widen the palette and in some instances idiosyncratic materials such as iron filings or discarded stonemasons' dust from ecclesiastical sites.

No protective glass frame is needed with the sands and the adhesives since the paintings have proved to resist the effect of direct sunlight without any yellowing of the varnish.