Off all the awesomely painstaking artwork we’ve shared over the years, these jars, created in the mid-later 19th century, probably required the most extraordinary amount of patience to create. Look closely, although the style may feel dated, these jars contain nothing but grains of colored sand, grains that were arranged to create amazingly precise and detailed designs, text and images.
They were created by Andrew Clemens (1857-1894), an Iowan artist who first began experimenting with sand art when he was 13 years old. He collected the colorful sands from the Pictured Rocks area.
“He fashioned special tools made from pieces of hickory and fish hooks that he used to arrange the sand in intricate designs. Clemens did not use glue in his artwork, relying on the pressure of the tightly packed surrounding grains to keep his artworks intact. Once an artwork was complete, Clemens would back the jar tightly and seal it.
Clemens had a remarkable ability to break down images and render it grain by grain with each piece of sand akin to a pixel of a digital image. He is thought to have produced hundreds of bottles during his lifetime but few survive today.”
Click here and here to view additional examples of Clemens’ extraordinary jars of sand art.
[via Twisted Sifter]
(via lostthehat)
