Winter 2024

Building Castles Made of Sand The Fantastic Wor ld of Sculptor Rusty Croft B Y M I CHA E L CHAT F I E LD A ccording to author, philosopher and artist Elbert Hubbard the happiest people on Earth are “A craftsman or artist whistling over a job well done. A little child building sandcastles.” He posits that “Happiness lies in a constructive job well done. Get your hap- piness out of your work or you will never know what happiness is.” By that metric, Rusty Croft certainly knows what happiness is. He’s not a little child, but he gets to spend his days sculpting mind-blowing structures out of sand, snow, ice as well as more permanent materials such as steel, wood and ceramics. Obviously multi-talented, Croft also paints,“but that’s work,” he says with a laugh. As everyone knows, playing in the sand is not work. A recent visit to Croft’s tool-filled Carmel Valley Quonset hut revealed several pieces in progress simultaneously.This is clearly a happy workplace. On the wall is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that the artist takes inspiration from: “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” A partially complete life-size horse made up of steel wire and a ceramic head takes up a good deal of the floor space. On a table sits a “vertical sandbox,” a large, rectan- Rusty Croft has carved out a living from something every child has enjoyed: taking wet sand and crafting it into fanciful shapes. This piece was used for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. 132 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 4 Photo: Courtesy of Rusty Croft