The East Neuk Festival has done it again with its latest sand sculpture from the company that brought you a pumpkin carving of Trump.

It was back in 2014 that the East Neuk Festival in Scotland made headlines when it celebrated its tenth year by commissioning a giant anamorphic portrait of Franz Schubert on Fife’s Elie Beach.

^{Video © Jamie Wardley}

This year, their 2017 Schubertiad saw them commissioning a new sand sculpture in the form of a huge bust of the Viennese Romantic created by Claire Jamieson and Jamie Wardley of Sand in Your Eye. The gigantic head was sculpted from 20 tonnes of sand and sits imposingly on East Neuk’s Crail High Street.

^{Photo © Colin Hattersley}

Unlike the 2014 artwork that was designed to disappear under the incoming tide, the latest creation was built to last at least as long as the Festival, which concluded on July 2. The five-day event featured a range of songs and chamber works from Schubert’s most productive decade (1816-1826) performed by musicians and leading international artists including pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja, the Belcea Quartet and baritone Thomas Oliemans accompanied by pianist Malcolm Martineau.

The Festival was the brainchild of Donald and Louise MacDonald who saw the potential for the region’s many churches to be pressed into venues for summer chamber music. An inaugural concert back in 1999 featured Beethoven’s Septet and Mendelssohn’s Octet, performed by players from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. In 2004, the MacDonalds were joined by Svend Brown to create the East Neuk Festival. Since then, a steady stream of artists have appeared in Fife, including pianist Christian Zacharias, the Belcea and Elias String Quartets, the Alban Berg Quartet, the Tokyo String Quartet and The Tallis Scholars, while audiences have grown from 700 in 2005 to around 25,000 in 2016.

Sand in Your Eyes is an innovative team of sand artists from West Yorkshire responsible for previous sculptures in Scotland that have included a bust of Beethoven.  In 2015, they created a series of sand sculptures on the Gold Coast as a promotion for Qantas (above). In recent years they have branched out into pumpkin carving, including this remarkably lifelike replica of the 45th President of the United States.

^{Professional pumpkin carving of Donald Trump made for Leeds Trinity Shopping Centre}