Encinitas residents may be familiar with the kaleidoscopic beach designs that sometimes appear north of Moonlight Beach and south of Beacon’s. The crafter of these sandy hieroglyphs is Kirk Van Allyn, who goes by the artistic alias Kirkos.

The art is uniquely transitory. Often crafted during a low tide, the mandala shapes melt slowly into an advancing ocean on the returning tide. Beachgoers, surfers, runners and walkers find themselves stopping to ponder the geometric patterns.

A local filmmaker, Mark Freeman, has captured Kirkos in the midst of creation in an interesting short film entitled “Lines in the Sand.” The seven-minute piece reveals the art in a wider context. Kirkos utilizes various unique instruments that would appear the tools of a crazed gardener: oversized rakes and a giant compass. The ocean recedes, thereby stretching an expanding canvas, which Kirkos frames in broad curvilinear strokes. A skeletal image spanning 50 feet across takes shape in the damp sand. A multi-wheeled element is used to dredge parallel lines of texture in alternating patterns within the array. Finally, the compass, the dreaded tool of middle school geometry is in Kirkos’ arsenal expanded to behemoth size. He expertly wields the tool, defining a sweeping iconographic wreath. The film captures the artwork’s brief duration: mesmerizing birth, brief life transformed by the sun, passerby reactions and ineluctable demise.

The planar sand sculptures seem to echo Tibetan sand painting. Tibetan sand painting invokes traditional geometric forms through the temporary placement of colored sands using metal funnels. The Tibetan sand paintings take several days to prepare and are later destroyed. Kirkos’ work evokes this tradition. Many of the notions of temporality and geometric recitation are employed. Kirkos’ toolset suggests a limited library of geometries. However, he bends and expands this geometric set into fascinating kaleidoscopic shapes.

Kirkos is among a growing movement of environmental artists. This description can be somewhat misleading. Certainly, in the consideration of Kirkos’ beach design, the viewer experiences a conservationist sigh. There are alluring metaphors in the disappearing image along the lines of unsustainable resource depletion. The pieces seem also to suggest ephemeral ideas beyond the obvious material choice: sand, sea and sun that evoke ideas of loss and of elusive symmetries.

Van Allyn doesn’t travel far to create his sand art—he lives in Leucadia. Everything about his home is a project in motion. A large polyhedral frame composed of six-foot hexagonal stock stands on edge in the front lawn. The purposefully cluttered sitting room and adjacent kitchen serve as studio and artwork. Van Allyn is remodeling the space with pleasant and well-lit curves almost like an Adobe Hogan. Every available surface is covered with design ideas, templates for future sand drawings, models for geometric sculptures.

Kirkos exudes a contagious enthusiasm. He maintains his bushy salt and pepper hair under a newsboy cap with a matching bristly mustache above a perpetual grin. When speaking about his art, every implement, tool and idea seems to segue into another project in the works. An accomplished oceanographer, Van Allyn spent his professional years performing deep sea measurements, taking ocean core samples, sounding the depth of the ocean floor. Frequently, he found himself alone on remote Pacific islands assembling complex oceanographic equipment for the purpose of scientific measurement. If the right implement was missing in the field, he was forced to improvise. That’s where he found that he excelled. The tools in his Leucadia home are evidence of this innovative energy. He demonstrated his latest sand-mapping device comprised of two, surf casting rods connected via a homemade sleeve. Kirkos balances this 30-foot stylus as a tightrope walker might a balancing rod, using it to scribe circular arcs. The rear of his dwelling opens into an expansive outdoor workshop. A 15-foot dodecahedron hangs from a tree-anchored suspension. A tarp draped with everyday tools transmogrified to new purposes lay open like a surgeon’s scalpel set. Kirkos demonstrated what appeared to be a six-foot narrow funnel, oddly decorated with an antique cornet. He is beginning to experiment with depositing rock salt and other material not dissimilar to the Tibetan sand painting.

Kirkos got started drawing elaborate sand paintings about 10 years ago on Father’s Day. Always interested in sketching along the beach, one Father’s Day he watched with pleasure as a young child excitedly took his father on a tour of Kirkos’ artwork. Being able to elicit such pleasure from both child and father simply by translating his geometric ruminations to the sand has held him captivated with sand painting for over a decade.

One afternoon as the tide began to rise, Kirkos was completing a labyrinth at Stone Steps. A passing jogger quizzed him, “why do you do this?” He blurted out the first thing that came to mind, “a sense of self expression through low complexity art.” •