Live Well San Diego Sculpture

Dreaming someday of creating my public art piece would take the experience I didn’t know would happen right in my backyard. Math instructor from our high school, San Dieguito High School in Encinitas. Class of I received a call from Manuletia Brown, my friend and sculptor artist of twenty-three years. She asked me if I would like to help create a public art piece for Live Well San Diego .

Assisting in this substantial project was an honor. The intricacies of the behind-the-scenes process surpassed my expectations. Learning how math, engineering, balance, design, and sculpting techniques was invaluable in making this piece grand. The extensive documentation through photos and videos will convey more than I can in words.

Realizing I had only 30 days to depict seven countries with three distinct icons each, the challenge resulted in 21 sculptures. With guidance from sculptor and friend Manuelita Brown, I created seven flowers, and she created the figure and the Kumeyaay Native American Hut. It was a significant learning experience as the city suggested skipping the initial clay flower-making step. It led me to craft large flowers from wax directly, as illustrated in the following photos.

Jasmine

Jasmine is like a poem from Persia. Delicate, atmospheric, and sweetly fragrant, it will climb magnificently over garden trellises and look gorgeous hanging from a suspended pot in drifts of white flowers. To learn more about the Jasmine Flower, enjoy this link.

Lotus

Lotus flowers are native to India, east Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia. They root themselves in the mud and send their lengthy stems upward to find the top of the water and bloom, hiding all of their foliage below. To learn more about the Lotus Flower, enjoy this link.

Protea

Proteas date back 300 million years, making them one of the oldest flowers on the planet. They are also called “sugar bushes” because they produce copious amounts of nectar. Proteas grow in a large variety of shapes and sizes. The flowers typically come in shades of pink, red, orange, white, and yellow. To learn more about the Protea, enjoy this link.

Rose

Let’s start with two questions. Where do roses come from? And how did they become so darn popular? Well, documents show roses as on-trend as far back as 2000 BC in what’s now recognized as Iraq. To learn more about the Rose, enjoy this link.

Plumeria

Plumeria is a genus of eleven species of shrubs and small trees in the dogbane family (Apocynaceae) native to tropical America, from Brazil to Mexico and the Caribbean. To learn more about the Plumeria, enjoy this link.

Dahlia

Mesoamerica, principally in the high plains of Mexico, also some species can be found in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador & Costa Rica.