Sandidge Sculpture Studio

[Update to below as of Jan. 1, 2008: Sandidge Sculpture Studio site was later relocated and can now be found HERE.]

OPENING AT A TERMINAL NEAR YOU

SANDIDGE SCULPTURE STUDIO!

Pope Leo

Have I said it enough times yet? The "Sandidge Sculpture Studio" is a web site that I designed for a friend of 30 years' standing, Bill Sandidge in San Antonio. I've been developing the site for over a month—I guess I've lost track of the weeks. Though I joke about it having "loose boards and falling bricks", there are no blind alleys or inoperative links, hardly anything that leads nowhere. Still, though it is finished, it isn't fully polished. There are some pages lacking full information or labeling. This will be corrected as time passes. Small changes will occur before your very eyes. Well, you may only look once, so I guess I exaggerate.

We've done it all by Bill passing the images and information about them to me via email and he's been viewing the changing results over the Internet and giving me feedback. I've been making the tables—the boxes—and fitting the photos in and writing out the aggravating code for the links and for displaying photos correctly.

Bill's site displays both past and present art works, most in concrete. There's garden sculpture of several sorts, including
- contemporary
- oriental
- animal depictions (camel, Afghan hound, pig, turtle)
- copies of Pre-Columbian works

There's a number of portraits (busts) of people whose lives and/or faces he has admired, including

- Pope Leo The Great
- Henry B. Gonzalez (Texas politician and U.S. congressman)
- Jacob Brodbeck (Texas aviation pioneer)
- Waldine Tauch (well-known Texas sculptor)
- R.P. Sandidge (Bill's father)
- Laslo Ujhazi (Hungarian freedom fighter and Texas historical figure)

The Ujhazi bust noted above was his first major piece to be cast in bronze and is located at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.

Oh, did I mention the figure studies? I mean, the nudes. The Naked Ladies. Not too many. There's always "The Sunbather" in concrete—some of you boys might be able to use a more durable form of girlfriend than you've had lately. But, watch out, she's a little abrasive.

I'd be happy for all of you with an interest to take a look at the site. It's not a bad result, I'd say, for a couple of fellows who haven't even managed to be in the same place at the same time for the past 8 or 10 years. Though they're only photos, I've had a chance to see far more of Bill's work at one time than before and it has given me the opportunity to realize that it's quite impressive. I remember when he started teaching himself and I thought, "He can't just learn that." I am glad to be proven wrong on that!

It's been a learning experience for me doing this web site, and there's a thing or two even now I wish I knew how to do. But my ambition may just have to wait until my brain can catch up.

We will be satisfied with this if we can just make as good a presentation of it as possible, and then go back to what we were doing. On the other hand, Mr. Sandidge would love to grow rich. No large checks will be turned away, returned, cancelled, torn in two, spat on, subjected to Mephistophelean rituals involving chicken blood and crushed eye of newt, or otherwise rejected.

If some of you have about as much money as I do, you still have eyes and may look for free at Bill's varied art works and the results of my tenacious HTML code. Practiced web designers would perhaps find my work Quick And Dirty and not CSS enough in places, but where were they when I needed 'em? If there's no fellow nutcase to phone in the middle of the night, you have to do it your own way—so screw 'em!

I like it and I'm proud of it.

Compliments, critiques, and helpful suggestions from readers will all be welcome and listened to. As a previewer, Zandria has already kindly pointed out some places in the "About The Artist" page to me where places and persons are presumed to be known to the reader, when in fact they are probably not. Those are the kind of rough edges someone else might easily see whereas I have been too busy with too many factors for too long. It's the old "can't see the forest for the trees" sort of thing. And of course sometimes I can't see the trees for the forest, either!