Chris Guinto would rather be working with clay or helping crocodiles. When the professional sand artist is featured on shows like Sand Blasters and Sand Wars, "They always expect, 'OK, tell us how much you love it,' and I'm like, 'I hate it,'" he says. Seven years ago he got divorced from another sand sculptor and tried to quit the profession. But then he married Melineige Beauregard, the current reigning world champion sand sculptor. Mel mentions their upcoming motorcycle trips and shipping their motorcycles to Africa this winter for a continental crossing. "If it wasn't for this day job," she reminds him, "you wouldn't have these motorcycles." "Sand definitely pays the bills," he concedes.
Seriously: Who's ever heard of a sand sculptor in it for the money? (But also, who's ever even met a sand sculptor?) Unlike Chris, however, Mel loves her work. She has spent her life shaping the ephemeral: first snow, then ice. These days, she prefers sand. Life as a sand artist is much warmer.
In 2021 she and Chris moved to Hawaii Island, combining each of their two decades of sand experience under Broken Glass Sand Sculptures. For a Best Western hotel convention at the Hawaii Convention Center, they carved a surfer out of twenty tons of sand hauled from an Oahu quarry. For an insurance company retreat on Maui, they organized a team-building sand sculpting competition. And in between that, sand logos for hotels and marriage proposals on the beach.
We meet in the spring at the Texas SandFest in Port Aransas, a town on a sliver of an island that looks like it splintered off the southeast edge of the state. They are in the busy season of sand festivals. A few weeks before, they were in Clearwater, Florida, and in about a week they will be in Busan, South Korea. To be a professional sand artist is to travel the coastal areas of the world: Zeebrugge, Belgium; Durban, South Africa; Kuwait. When Chris started dating Mel, he says, "the only way I could see her was at competitions. So I had to start working competitions. I had to convince people that I like sand sculpting again so they'd invite me."
But he says he's dropping out of them. To win, he says, you have to make "happy things like butterflies and flowers," whereas he's drawn to darker themes. Last year, at the Hampton Beach Sand Sculpting Classic in New Hampshire, he carved a horned skull with fangs resembling leathery tentacles slithering out of its mouth. On the back, a scroll of signatures included Caesar, JFK, Joan of Arc, Homer, Confucius. He named it "The Devil Is in the Details," inspired by the legend of the blues musician Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil for musical success. "I figured if him, why not anyone else?" Chris says. "So the signatures are successful people around the world who could have potentially sold their souls to the devil to acquire whatever greatness that was bestowed upon them." It won the Governor's Award, but when a photo was posted on the event's Facebook page, people were horrified by the governor's choice: "Evil out in the open," "Disturbed," "Satanic," read the comments. Meanwhile, Mel's sculpture, "Love Is a Universal Temple," a curving cathedral with a simian child snuggling up to an adult ("It's about how when you're in the love emotion, you're in your own temple," she said of it at the time), won both the judges' first-place prize and the audience award.
In competitions like Texas SandFest in Port Aransas—the country's largest beach sand sculpting event—artists are paid for their time and travel expenses as well as the chance to win a few thousand dollars in prize money. Over the course of a few days, they carve compacted sand with trowels and spatulas made for frosting cake as spectators watch.
On the first day of sculpting at SandFest, it looks like Mel's sensibilities dominate. A woman's face emerges out of the sand, sheltered by the soft folds of a hooded cloak. Just wait, Chris promises. It'll get darker.
Sand sculpting is in Mel's blood. Her dad sculpted sand, snow and ice, and her half sister by the same father is competing right next to her at SandFest. Growing up in Quebec, Melineige began with snow when she was 16 and then joined her dad when she was 20 to compete in her first sand sculpture contest. Now she's widely regarded as one of the best sand sculptors in the world, according to SandFest's organizers. "I love doing things with my hands, and I love creating," she says. She decided to make a business out of it, hosting workshops and carving company logos in ice, snow and sand, growing to the point where she could even hire her dad.
As for Chris, he lied his way into sand sculpting. When he was 30, making something—he doesn't remember what exactly—at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a passerby told him he should enter a sand competition. So he did. "I made a huge, thirty-foot crocodile, and I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm gonna win.'" He lost. "Sand castles win every time," Chris laments. But someone suggested he try out for the master level at the Neptune Festival in Virginia Beach. "I'm like, 'Dude, I just got my ass handed to me.'" Still, he contacted the organizers, and they told him to send photos of what he'd done so far. Done so far? All he had was a losing croc. So he made a two-foot gorilla, dug a hole deep in the sand in front of it and took a photo from the bottom, angled up. "It looked huge!" he says. He told Neptune Festival organizers that it was thirty feet tall. They invited him to compete, and from there, sand just sucked him in.
About the crocodiles: Chris worked as a full-time crocodile and alligator trapper with Florida Fish and Wildlife. Well, technically, as a "nuisance alligator trapper and crocodile response agent," he says. "They're completely different animals, so two different programs." In the Florida Keys, where he was then living, there was no dearth of crocs to extract from people's swimming pools. But Chris also wanted to educate, "teaching people to live with them versus moving them all the time, because they are native." Most people aren't into it, though. "There's no animal that's more hated, except for a mosquito," he says. "But they ate dinosaurs. They lived through an ice age. A few species are critically endangered, but while I live and breathe, they're still all here. And I'd like to see all of them stay." In 2019 he and Mel started The Crocodile Foundation, working to help crocodiles around the world, particularly in developing nations, "where the management programs aren't the best, or nonexistent," he says.
We end up talking more about crocodiles than sand. Crocodiles, dinosaurs, horror movies—"that's my thing," Chris says. "I thrive in that world, and then I do sand and I'm like, 'Oh my god ...'"
"It's all cute stuff," Mel says.
Back on the beach, Chris struggles to sculpt two plumeria blossoms. Mel carves the curves of a woman's face and figure. Beside them, another team—not the one with Mel's sister—shapes a number of life-size cats. Chris and Mel roll their eyes; they think it's pandering. Mel wields a masonry trowel in each hand, one for slicing away swaths of sand and a smaller one for contouring the eyes. When she's done, the face's serene gaze will follow the viewer like the Mona Lisa's. "Sculpting sand is carving sand, but it's also the carving of light," Mel says. "I love to create texture. They are like colors in sand. Because sand is very monochrome. You have to work with shadows, and texture brings a lot of shadows."
Defending SandFest champion Melineige Beauregard, considered one of the world's top sand sculptors, formed Broken Glass Sand.
A clowder of sand cats by Paul and Remy Hoggard, who met in a sand sculpture theme park in Belgium and now live in Bulgaria.
Sand sculpting is more subtractive than additive—more like chiseling marble than molding clay. The day before, the twenty master-level sculptors (ten solo and five team) "pounded sand," the process of compacting sand and a lot of water into a rectangular, two-foot-tall plywood form, then stacking another on top and repeating the process. The result for Chris and Mel looks like a twelve-foot-tall wedding cake. They work layer by layer from the top down—the forms serving as scaffolding for them to stand on—removing each form only when the layers above are done.
Packed sand is as hard as pavement and yet as easy to dig a spoon into as shave ice.
Theirs is the tallest sculpture. "I'm known as the king of collapse," Chris says. (For competitions at least—for jobs, he's much more conservative, he hastens to add.) "Sand is one of the only art forms you'll come across where you're not allowed to think outside the box." Gravity will pull protrusions down; undercut too much, as another sculptor carving a mouse slaying a serpent found that day, and you risk collapse. Along with human hubris, forces of nature also chip away at sculptures. Last year at SandFest, the high tide crept under Chris and Mel's final form so that when they removed the plywood, the sculpture instantly crumpled. Another hazard: drunk people. Bars and sand sculptures don't mix, but where there's a beach town, there's usually a bar. One year someone messed with the sculptures at night, so now there are fences and twenty-four-hour security guards.
Despite the obstacles, "Sand sculpting is way easier than it looks," Chris insists. (Though at the moment he's making those plumerias look incredibly difficult—he wasn't kidding when he said flowers aren't his thing.) Mel says she thinks people are so impressed "because everybody tried it at some point. Everybody went to the beach and tried to make a little castle or a little turtle, and then it's hard to believe from what you tried and didn't succeed so much, to see [a sculpture] that's twelve feet high. But it's because you didn't have the technique or because you're using some beach sand that's really not good."
The best sand for sculpting is fine and sticky—the kind that clings to your feet and gets all over your food and floors. The ideal grains are also more angular than smooth. Round sand is like tiny marbles, and marbles don't stack. Faceted grains, however, can lock into each other. Port Aransas sand is perfect, but not all festivals can use the sand that washes up on its shores; almost half of the festivals have to bring in sand from a quarry. In Hawaii, if you're looking to try your hand, stay away from the black sand at some of Hawaii Island's beaches, which Chris says "is terrible. It's very big." But certain beaches, like at Puna or northwest Oahu or Hanalei Bay on the north shore of Kauai, have ideal sand for sculpting.
"Symbiosis," by Joris Kivits (seen above) and Seveline Beauregard (Melineige's half sister) at SandFest. The sculptures are constantly misted with water, which helps the sand cohere, and finished with a spray of diluted wood glue, which forms a thin crust to preserve the details.
The imposing visage of Neptune by Polish sculptor Wiaczeslaw Borecki. Sand sculptures are as ephemeral as they are beautiful; they're bulldozed almost immediately after the festival. "A twelve-foot tall, twelve- to twenty-ton competition sculpt collapsing on someone could result in serious injury or death," Guinto says.
Isabelle Gasse from Quebec carves a piece titled "The Giving Pond" at SandFest.
By day three the skeleton has emerged. Below the sand woman's outstretched arm and beside her shapely leg, bones extend like a dinosaur's spine. Indeed, crouched in the sand with brushes in hand, Chris looks more like a paleontologist excavating prehistoric vertebrae. It is their last full day to work—judging begins at noon the next day. Next to them, about a dozen cats have been completed. On the other side, the team with Melineige's sister, Seveline, has sculpted a face, half sprouting fungus and the other half a flowering skull. The cats aside, most of the work is not cute. It is often surreal, hinting at sinister, like the raven-masked woman on her back with a bird drinking out of the cavity in her chest. Sometimes it's flat-out sinister, like the vampire, all sharp angles and teeth, leering over a sleeping body.
Competitions are one of the few times professional sand sculptors—who hail from all over the world, including Bulgaria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland—can make whatever they want. Much of their paid work is corporate logos and predetermined designs and wedding displays. "It's always two animals kissing," Chris says. "Two dolphins kissing, two turtles kissing, two seahorses kissing." So in Texas, most of the sculptors seem to be letting their darker sides loose.
"I don't know any [sand artists] who are nice and proper," says Suzanne Altamare, one of the SandFest coordinators. She estimates there are about five hundred professional sand sculptors in the world, and they're like "stray and feral cats," she says. She would know: She once had sixty cats, abandoned and stray (she's down to eighteen now). When Chris was moving to the Florida Keys, he stayed with Suzanne for a time. He asked if he could bring an iguana. He brought five, including one named Bruiser, "who put twelve stitches in a guy in Pennsylvania," Suzanne says.
When Chris and Melineige finish, they scrap their working title, "The Shadow Within," in favor of "Mother Nature." They go on to sweep the awards: first-place master duo sculptors, as well as people's choice and sculptors' choice. Tomorrow they'll head home to Hawaii. By the time they're in Busan, about a week later, working on sand tableaux of "Guernica" and "Birth of Venus," their previous piece will no longer exist. "For me that's the beauty of it—move forward," Melineige says. "I'm very good at letting go of things, not clinging to them."
For an art so ephemeral, it has a persistent hold. "I feel like I've been trying to quit sand sculpting ever since I started," Chris says. "Sand sculpting is like the mafia: No matter what you do, you keep getting dragged back in." And yet he is complicit. In his "Devil Is in the Details" sculpture, he had signed his own name on the contract: His soul in exchange for "becoming the best sand sculptor in the world."