“Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.” Stella Adler

I and other receptive souls think of our shore as a living mural, we walk amidst art in motion. I captured some of it with my camera.

Art is the silhouette of these flowing lines in the flying sea.

So, when friends Gregg and Alex, on the boards, pointed out a strange construction, I went down to our sea’s edge to see it. I found a driftwood pyramid about two and a half feet at its base and edge lines. Had art somehow risen from the sand?

Cool, I thought at first, but I became amazed when I noticed the light driftwood stood without any bonding at the junctures: no wire, cord, or vines. The seventeen mph wind did not affect the sticks. 

Neighbor Amanda said she saw the man build it, and another friend, Karen Dinan, told me the artist was John Madera. So I contacted John and then met him as he built another sculpture. As I descended to the sands, I saw him, a silhouette of art as he worked his sculpture.

This piece was in line with his others, similarly sized and about a beach length apart. 

I expected John to say he’d been building beach art since his teens, so I was astonished when he said he had begun—only a few months ago. This sculpture was his 31st; he calls it “Becoming 31.”

John told me he’s been trekking the shore in Long Beach since June, having come from NYC grieving a relationship loss. He later texted me that he was going from, in his words, “seeming bliss to whelming grief to vivifying acceptance and profound awakening.”

At first, he walked our shore for miles, sometimes into Atlantic Beach. In the fall, he began picking up driftwood but had no idea what to do with it. So he kept carrying it until the load became heavy. Then, he started building sculptures.

With a Master in Literature Arts from Brown University, John, fifty-one, writes (He has a book coming out in spring 2024: Nervosities,) fiction, poetry, and non fiction. He said he lives on “a strand of a frayed string precariously woven together.” He makes money as a writer, musician, editor, publisher, publicist, and teacher. John plays bass, guitar, and drums. He composes music as well. He said he was awarded a $10,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to support his writing in 2024. 

You can sometimes find John earning his living at Long Beach’s, Cabana, The Cafe, and Roc and Olive. He often plays with his good friend, Ben Metzger, or Benoir, as he is known for his music studio named Studio Noir. You can hear them here as they played at the Long Beach Arts in the Plaza this summer.

As John spoke and built, I could see and feel his passion. Despite the cold, he worked bare-handed; he liked to feel the wood beneath his fingers.

He said, “Building the sculptures is the exhalations, the breathing out of our connectedness.” He calls his beach sculptures “becomings” or as he later corrected, “Becoming-Line sculptures,” as he creates them, and unbecomings as they break down.

John said somebody destroyed many of his sculptures. He saw tire tracks near the wrecks, so he suspected beach officials. I later checked with Beach Maintenance and learned the structures were a hazard/liability, so they are not allowed. 

It was so strange that the winter winds could not blow one slim stick from John’s sculptures, but our Long Beach rules and concern for lawsuits—a risk so minute, especially in winter—took them down.

John said his work is “meant to be collapsed,” naturally. He said, “I’ve been documenting them falling apart. He said there’s an eloquence to what nature does that I keep learning from.”

John said, “I’ve actually collected sticks I’ve used before, so there’s a beauty in that. I’m making them, and they are becoming, I’m breathing them out, and then, they are unbecoming. I also think of them as ruins in progress. They are unraveling.” 

He told me he found dead herring gulls on our shore and made what he called “burial wreaths” for them. He said, “It’s sad to encounter a dead thing but it is part of the circle of life.” He told me the birds died, “…of plastic webbing, wrapped around them, perhaps assholes in their yachts are throwing things into the sea. And these creatures are dead because of those people.” When I said, Maybe the plastics came from the beach,” he said, “It might have but I have not seen too much garbage on the beach.”

I’ll say genus rectus-simianus is not limited to yacht owners or land trekkers, it’s a cruel amphibious species.

John said, “I’ve been in visual arts for a long time. I think about lines of flight. I work with crosshatching and various layering of lines.” I saw examples of it and more sculpting on his Facebook, and Instagram pages.

He told me his drawings run off the page and onto our beach. He said, “I wanted to explore and take them off the page. I wanted to materialize, to make something more palpable, more experiential in a surrounding. While I’m making them, the goal is not to think but to dissolve and breathe out. It’s feeling as form.”

Policy and rules, so needed for order in our world, are sometimes destructive to the free spirit of art. Such driftwood stick art should be allowed in these winter months. There are hardly any beachgoers, and many of us love John’s art.

A few Facebook comments on John’s sculptures: “Meaningful,” “speaks powerfully,” “such joy,” “Figurative, dynamic in emotive power,” “Playing in public space in visibility with natural offerings…I am deeply moved by it.”

Danny McDonough was so moved, he made a video of John’s work with the soundtrack Soul Fire by Lee Scratch Perry:

As Stella Adler said, “Life beats down and crushes the soul…” These days, our souls are taking a crushing every time we turn on the TV. The breathing out by John Madera helps remind us we have a soul, a soul of love and art. John’s breath warms our cold, dark days with curiosity, wonder, joy.

Maybe our City by the Sea considers John’s sculptures a kind of beach graffiti. If so, it might do well to recall Bansky: “I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don’t like it, you can paint over it.”

Let’s let our Noreaster gales and sea surges cause “unbecomings” to yield in a natural “paint over;” it’s nature’s job—not the job of bureaucracy’s joy-crushing wheels.

Our Beach Maintenance does a fantastic job, especially in summer, but all year too.

I can see beach crews put their hearts into doing their jobs well, and their leadership needs to be thanked. But maybe they need to think outside the sandbox.

Winter beach art needs not to be just allowed—it needs to be encouraged. Winter solstice is today, and winters are expected to be warmer—thank you, climate change—not.

But Long Beach might consider encouraging winter sculpting art. It might lead to more participants, which could lead to competitions, festivals for driftwood sculpting, sand castle building. If it snows, snowman competitions, igloo sculpting.

Surfers are year-rounders at our Lincoln Ave. beach now. Family and friends gather there; the restroom there is open year- round. Lazar’s Glizzy boardwalk shack already offers coffee, teas—hot cocoas—soups and great food—all year. Maybe it’s best to think of our beach as a giant winter sandbox where we can be, as our Facebook Friend put it. “Playing in public space…with natural offerings.”

Why just be a summer City by the Sea?

Be well,

Leebythesea