Jim Denevan

Most people have been inspired to do it at some point while walking on the beach: pick up a piece of driftwood and start scrawling in the sand -- an improvised baseball diamond, a tic-tac-toe board, or just an abstract design. Jim Denevan, a former chef from Santa Cruz, California, has taken the idea a little further. Given the right beach, he will walk for hours to draw swirling patterns on a monumental scale, knowing that they will be erased by the next tide. Recently, using a dry lake bed in Nevada as his canvas, he made a freehand drawing three miles in diameter. Within a week, the composition was washed away in a rainstorm. But that's the whole point of his work: the intangible, evanescent nature of beauty.