Meet the man who draws the answers of the universe on the sand at Polzeath beach

Every day is a school day as I discovered

By Olivier Vergnault Senior Reporter Cornwall Live 11 DEC 2022

It’s not every day you get to discuss The Seed of Life, Carl Jung’s work on analytical philosophy or put into practice Fibonacci’s golden number. Yet it’s exactly what sand artist Bill Bartlett and I did when we met up at his place of work on a beach in North Cornwall.

Overlooked by the house where Jung, the eminent psychologist, held one of his famous lectures almost exactly a hundred years ago, Polzeath beach is where I met Bill to learn more about the meaning behind his fascinating sand art. Bill starts by drawing a circle on the hard wet sand. Six more circles soon intersect with the first forming a flower and petals. Then it's my turn to have a go with the long pole and rake that Bill uses to make his art.

“It literally started with a circle,” Bill explains. “I stumbled on this whole sand drawing thing by accident. I was on the beach at Pentireglaze one day and I drew some circles on the sand. I posted the picture on Facebook and this Australian woman contacted me to say how nice it was to see someone draw The Tree of Life. I looked into this sacred geometry she was talking about and that was me hooked.”

Bill was not always a sand artist but drawing giant Metatron's Cubes and Fibonacci spirals in the sand seems to be his true calling. An English, IT and pastoral care teacher who also worked as a teacher all over the UK and at private schools in far flung locations around the world from Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia to Kenya, he moved to New Polzeath ten years ago where his own mother had been holidaying since she was a young girl in the 1930's and where she settled   40 years ago.

“Metatron's Cube is a geometric figure made up of 13 circles,” Bill explained in answer to my puzzled look. “When you join all the centres you get the Platonic Solids which contain everything that exists with equal sides. You could spend your life messing around with that. But I can teach people to draw The Seed of Life on a big scale, and then it’s up to them. I usually find that people will surprise themselves in how imaginative they can be.”

On the day we met on Polzeath beach, the tide was right out and the compacted sand was covered in bumps and ripples, giving the canvas a unique texture under the beautiful light and clear skies.

My own circle frankly didn’t look like much to be honest. I'm not really sure it was a ‘circle’ my geometry teacher from my school days would have approved of. And when I started adding six more intersecting circles it soon became apparent errors were creeping in, making my design geometrically wonky. Think rugby balls rather than footballs.

“That’s the beauty of sand art,” Bill said. “Every time is different. You always start with a fresh canvas. You can strive for perfection all you want, it will be washed away by the rising tide in the end anyway. So relax.”

There is a certain humility in sand drawing. Like mandalas and zen gardens, the more you get engrossed and lost in it, the more spiritual an experience it can become. You are in the moment, focused, outside in nature, on a beach, breathing in the clean iodine rich sea air.

Bill, 65, and the father of three grown-up children, spends most days on the beach a five-minute walk from his flat at the top of the hill. Even on a busy summer’s days when Polzeath beach can be rammed with tourists, he will find a spot large enough on the sand to create his beautiful geometric art.

Families, visitors, employees on corporate team bonding exercises and even other artists call on Bill to join him on the beach. The sand artist and coastal walks tour guide said he doesn’t really do sand writing but he had someone come to him once who wanted to propose to his girlfriend in style.

“I did these giant hearts on the sand and wrote ‘will you marry me’ and he took his girlfriend who had no idea about it to the top of the cliff and went down on one knee. There were a few people watching. She said yes thankfully. I think it would have been awkward if she hadn’t.”

On another occasion a German film crew linked to the TV adaptations of Rosemunde Pilcher’s books asked Bill to do something similar but usually speaking he’d rather concentrate on Seeds and Trees of Life rather than corporate messages and logos.

While most of the courses he leads take place during the peak tourist season he’s hoping to work with a social prescriber in Wadebridge and Port Isaac to help people whose mental and physical health could benefit from being outside on a beach doing something creative.

“Polzeath gets in your blood,” Bill said. “I’ve been here 10 years and it didn’t take very long. There is a picture of my mum on the spot where we are now that was taken in 1933 when she was a little girl. She lived her for 40 years so I guess it was in her blood too.”

He added: “What I like about sand art is that in less than five minutes I give people permission to do something they would not normally do or feel embarrassed about. Suddenly they are free. And with the sand, the sea and the wind it changes all the time. I’m not bothered about technicality. It’s about aesthetics. Once people go up to the path and look down on the beach they soon realise how amazing their work is and how creative they can be. That line they thought wasn’t straight suddenly is. It’s just a matter of perspective.”

Once I completed my Seed of Life, Bill handed me a small metal rake to apply texture to the forms inside my motif. That’s when I realised how my mistakes had got bigger and bigger with each new circle, and not all could be fudged over with the rake. So in the end my raking turned a Seed of Life into what I thought looked more like a Templar’s Cross.

As Bill unfurled a knotted rope and corkscrew metal spike for our next piece of art he pointed to the blue house above us on the New Polzeath side of the beach. It’s where Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung who founded analytical psychology held a series of seminars to a select few in 1923.

“Why did he come to Polzeath?” asked Bill. “That’s the big question. Most people don’t even know that Jung, who once worked with Freud, came here at all. The people who own the house probably don't know either but actually they have a picture of me drawing on the sand taken through their top window on their Facebook page, which Jung would describe as synchronous.”

Bill said his aim is to sometimes get on the beach earlier than the dog walkers as the dogs will invariably run at him through his designs. Yet he doesn't mind. "At times I'll just draw around the trail the dogs have left in the sand. That way they're part of it."

As we move away from my first sand creation - you know, the Seed of Life / Templar’s Cross / rugby ball thing... - Bill explains the marks on his rope. They form part of Fibonacci’s golden number theory. Leonardo Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician from the Republic of Pisa, and is considered to be “the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages”.

As well as popularising the Indo–Arabic numeral system in the Western world, he first came up with what is known as the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers (starting with one rather than zero). Referred to at times as the golden ratio, if you represent each value with a square and join them with a line you end up with a spiral, like the one we drew on the sand in Polzeath.

“It’s in that perfect wave you surf,” Bill said as we spiralled closer and closer, tethered together by his knotted rope. “It’s in the seashells and snails you find. It’s in the spirals of galaxies across the Universe. It’s everywhere!”

If you want to join Bill on his walks or go on a sand art course contact him on 07486 461998 or via his website at www.northcornwallcoastpathwalks.co.uk