page_title: Sandpainting
section_title: Sand bottles
hierarchical_section_title: Sandpainting / History / Sand bottles
caption_attribution_description: English: Andrew Clemens (American, 1857–1894) Sand Bottle, 1879 (front view) Colored sand in glass bottle 8 x 2 ½ x 2 ½ inches (20.3 x 6.4 x 6.4 cm) Collection of C. Wesley and Shelley Cowan, Terrace Park, Ohio
context_page_description: Sandpainting is the art of pouring coloured sands, and powdered pigments from minerals or crystals, or pigments from other natural or synthetic sources onto a surface to make a fixed, or unfixed sand painting. Unfixed sand paintings have a long established cultural history in numerous social groupings around the globe, and are often temporary, ritual paintings prepared for religious or healing ceremonies. It is also referred to as drypainting.
  Drypainting is practised by Native Americans in the Southwestern United States, by Tibetan and Buddhist monks, as well as Indigenous Australians, and also by Latin Americans on certain Christian holy days.
context_section_description: In the 1860s to 1890s, Andrew Clemens a deaf mute born in Dubuque, Iowa, USA became famous for his craft of creating unfixed pictures using multicoloured sands compressed inside glass bottles or ornate chemist jars. The sand was collected from the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. The subjects of his sand bottles included ornately decorated sentimental verses, sailing ships, plants, animals and portraits.
  He exhibited his work at the St. Louis trade fair and having spent hours creating a picture in a bottle would demonstrate to an incredulous audience that the picture inside was unfixed by destroying the bottle with a hammer. Clemens' sand bottles have become museum pieces and highly prized antiques which have since sold at auction for thousands of US dollars.
caption: Sand bottle by Andrew Clemens, 1879
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