The Orange Trace

1997 - 2004

Sculpture by Jeff Sanders

Photographs by Matt Sanders

The Orange Trace

The Ventura River Trail

Opened in 1999, the Ventura River Trail is a pedestrian and bicycle path that follows the old Southern Pacific "right of way" from Main Street to Foster Park, 6.3 miles inland. The path links the Ojai Valley and Coastal Omer Rains Trail to create a longer 17-mile bike path recognized as one of the finest in Southern California.

Click here for a copy of the Ventura River Trail Brochure

Environmentally, the trail is unique in that it traverses several ecological zones and skirts the edge of habitats important to many resident and migratory birds. Through funding by the City of Ventura Public Art Program, the natural landscape has been further enhanced through the commissioning and installation of artwork that seeks to interpret Ventura's economic, cultural and environmental history. One of these works is The Orange Trace.

A Brief History

In 1995, after the plans for the Ventura River Trail were completed, the city of Ventura Public Art Program, through a competitive process, selected artist Judd Fine to design a public art plan for the new 6.3-mile trail. Fine's proposal was to create a series of 32 concrete markers topped by artifacts once used in the local oil fields and place them along the entire trail as distance markers. Fine also thought that the project would be further enhanced by including the work of other local artists in the project. In April of 1997, Fine called together a meeting of interested area artists and asked them each to submit proposals keyed to locations along the trail's corridor.

One of these artists, sculptor Jeff Sanders, was intrigued by the possibilities. He was interested in how the use of this bike path could potentially create a series of unfolding images that would emerge as the rider rode along. His idea was to place several groups of cast bronze oranges at various places along the trail. The oranges would be crafted as realistically as possible and be arranged so as to appear to have fallen from the train that historically transferred produce from Ojai to Ventura. The artwork was to be titled The Orange Trace. As a sculptor the idea had several qualities that appealed to Sanders. First, it was such a natural fit for the location that it could potentially be completely overlooked by the uninvolved bicyclist. Even if noticed, the bronze oranges could pass for real. Also, by situating his artwork in several locations along the trail, the bike rider would encounter it repeatedly, each time with a subtly different environmental setting.

The Orange Trace, as a concept, was approved for inclusion in the Ventura River Trail Project. Enthusiastic about the project, Sanders began to develop his ideas. He planned to create more than 100 painted cast bronze oranges and install them along the Ventura River Trail in the area of Crooked Palm Road. He also designed a complex assembly for keeping the separate oranges securely anchored to the ground.

During the following year, while the River Trail was under construction, Sanders worked to fabricate the bronze oranges and prepare them for installation, which was scheduled to coincide with the completion of the trail. Eventually, the construction of the trail was far enough along for Sanders to explore sections of the path on his bike. Immediately he was concerned. The area he initially preferred for the site of his sculpture was problematic due to the changes with the trail's grading and the potential drainage problems. He decided that he was going to have to find a new location, one that was more level with the path. Eventually, he chose a new site that stretched from Stanley Ave. to a place just below the OST Trucks and Cranes Yard where several groupings of bronze oranges could be placed.

When the trail was finished, Sanders prepared to Install The Orange Trace, which required that indentations in the surface of the ground be filled with about four inches of concrete in which a re-bar matrix was placed. After a few days, the painted bronze oranges were screwed onto their anchors and secured with special setscrews. Topsoil was then raked around the oranges so that the sculpture site resembled the natural terrain bordering the rest of the trail.

When the installation was complete, Sanders was satisfied with the result. However, there was one aspect that concerned him. The rough, informal characteristics of the ground around the installation seemed perhaps a little too informal and rough. Suddenly, after so much effort, the idea that the artwork could be overlooked seemed a disappointing possibility.

However, after the trail opened to bike riders, it became clear that Judd Fine's overall concept for the trail had worked after all. The artwork provided "discoveries" along the route, and over the next two years, Sanders heard many stories about the various encounters people had had with The Orange Trace. Then, one day, employees of a metal recycling business in the Ventura Avenue area became suspicious when some homeless men brought in a shopping cart containing 38 bronze oranges that had been, apparently, removed from the sculpture with a large pipe wrench. This was not the men's first visit to the recycling center. In the past they'd acquired 50 cents per orange based on weight. This time, however, the City of Ventura Public Art Department was notified and the oranges were recovered. When Sanders inspected the oranges, he could see that the pipe wrench had damaged the finish but that the castings were still intact. Nevertheless, back at The Orange Trace site he discovered that all the remaining oranges were damaged, bent over, or buried. Later, Sanders learned that during construction work on a nearby development a tractor driver, who didn't notice the oranges, inadvertently drove over the sculpture.

Ultimately, after months of negotiations with the insurance company and the disappearance of many remaining oranges, the artist was finally poised to begin the restoration process. Rebuilding The Orange Trace was a course of action that involved removing all the original concrete footings, recasting about 60 oranges, re-fabricating all the orange groups with the new design, and developing a new anchoring system. Also, it was clear to Sanders that a more centralized location nearer an area frequented by people at all times of the day might inhibit the vandalism.

In 2004 The Orange Trace was reinstalled to an area adjacent to Sycamore Village between two walkways leading to the bicycle path. The area, 5 yards wide and 36 yards long, is a little more formal with a unifying fine gravel ground cover that further defines The Orange Trace as a work of art.

Fabricating The Orange Trace out of Bronze

Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, has been around for more than 5,000 years, and in all that time the process has changed very little. The making of a cast bronze work is a complex and time consuming process, requiring specific technical expertise. Each separate piece of cast bronze must pass through the entire process, so the artwork, The Orange Trace, comprised of one hundred separate pieces, demanded that the bulk of this complex process be completed one hundred times.

Creating a cast bronze shape from a natural or sculptural form begins with a mold. For The Orange Trace, Sanders created three different molds using actual fruit: two Valencia oranges and one navel orange. Each mold consists of an interior lining of flexible silicone rubber and an outer plaster case that supports the silicone interior. A mold can be incredibly detailed, and so great care was taken to capture the subtle surface nuances of the oranges.

Even though the oranges will eventually be cast in bronze, they must first be cast in wax. For this particular project Sanders used a red pattern wax to create a wax "positive" from the "negative" mold, paying close attention to temperature, which is key to the success of the original wax cast. If the wax is used at too high a temperature, it will leave a very thin layer on the interior of the mold, and if it's too cold it won't flow over the mold's surface and the details will be lost.

Each project differs in how the wax works inside the mold. Because the orange is a fairly simple shape (spherical), producing a wax cast required two pours of wax. First, a ladle of wax at 140 degrees F is poured into the mold through an opening at one end (in this case at the base of the orange). After the wax is poured, the hole at the end of the mold is plugged and the mold is rolled and tumbled in all directions, allowing the wax to reach every part of the mold's interior surface. After the excess wax is poured out and the mold allowed to stand and cool, a second pour of wax is made and again the mold is rolled and the excess wax poured out. After the last pour, it takes about 30 minutes for the wax to cool enough for the outer plaster mold to be removed and the flexible silicone lining peeled away. After the wax oranges were cast. Sanders created groupings, attaching the separate oranges with bars of wax and fitting them with a funnel shaped cup at the top to provide a place where the molten bronze can later be poured.

At this point the artist employed the services of a foundry to finish the artwork's metamorphosis into bronze. Here a secondary mold was created in the foundry's "dip room" by repeatedly dipping the wax shape into a thin liquid ceramic slurry that hardens as it dries. The resulting ceramic shell will ultimately contain the molten bronze, but at this point the unfired shell contains the wax oranges and wax bars that hold them together. Using a process called "lost wax," the wax is removed by placing each shell upside down into an autoclave. In this device water is heated into high temperature steam, which melts all the wax, leaving only the ceramic shell remnant. The interior surface of this shell retains all the surface detail that was present on the surface of the wax model.

Once the wax is melted out, the remaining ceramic shells serve as a mold for the heated metal. For this part of the process temperature is an important issue. If the molten metal is confronted with cold it stops flowing, so it is important that the metal be poured into molds that have been heated. For The Orange Trace the ceramic shells were placed in a kiln and heated to over 2,000 degrees then removed from the kiln and placed with the funnel shape opening up in a container of sand. The metal, which has been heated in a crucible, is then lifted and tilted, causing the molten bronze to pour into the funnel opening, filling the entire shell.

After several hours of cooling the brittle ceramic shell can be cracked away from the now hard bronze. The bars of bronze are cut off and the oranges separated from the group. At this point each piece is a hollow sphere with a bronze collar at its base. The bronze collar is cut off as close to flush as possible, leaving an opening of about 1 1/4" in diameter at the base of the orange. A large opening such as this was required because the shell needed to fully dry inside and outside during the shell dipping process.

To fill this opening and provide a solid mounting point, Sanders machined several plugs that would, on one end, fit the hole in the orange's base and, on the other end, make a transition to fit the æ" stainless steel pipe that is part of the anchoring system. Sanders then designed a multi-cavity silicone mold so that several wax plugs could be made at one time. The plugs were dipped, melted, heated, and poured in bronze.

For the original installation the artist drilled and threaded each plug and mounted it on a ?" stainless steel bolt with a locking setscrew. But in order to protect the artwork Sanders knew that the anchoring system for the new installation was going to have to be redesigned. To that end, he decided to weld the pieces together. Using a tungsten inert gas process, he welded together each plug and pipe assembly, and then welded this assembly to each bronze orange. After the welding process, each assembly was lightly sanded and treated to glass bead blasting to produce a clean and smooth surface for painting.

The artist's next challenge was to give the oranges their "authentic" look through painting. For Sander's, developing the original concept and then eventually painting it were the most artistic aspects of the project. However, after the concept stage, more than 1,000 individual operations had to be performed by the artist and the foundry before there was anything in bronze to paint.

Sanders' painting process began by building temporary wooden stands that were designed to hold each of the oranges. From here he applied an epoxy primer to the bronze oranges formulated to help the following coats of paint adhere. The oranges were then sprayed from all possible angles with a bright yellow acrylic urethane. This yellow color was used as a first coat to make the final orange color of the artwork appear more intense. For the following coat the artist used an orange acrylic urethane and after that a red/orange toner. This red/orange toner, which is applied in short light bursts from a very small spray gun, produces a "sun burn" effect or high lights on the surface of the orange.

After the painting process was complete, the artist's next challenge was to install the oranges so that they appeared to have a random and unplanned appearance. To achieve this look the artist dropped two dozen real oranges on a grid and photographed the results from atop a ladder. The photographs were reviewed and ten different unique groupings were chosen. The background grid from the photographs made it easy to replicate the groupings by creating a full size paper grid pattern for each layout. The oranges were then assembled into the planned groupings and from there attached to the rebar matrix.

To install the sculpture on site, Sanders began by digging out a 4" deep recess into which he poured concrete. Once the groups of oranges and their anchoring assemblies were placed securely in the concrete, the entire area was covered with a layer of fine gravel mixed with dry cement. This mixture produces a stabilizing effect and provides a uniform surface around the oranges.

With this process, The Orange Trace is not only secured to the ground but also to a larger collection of artwork that contributes to this trailside public art gallery in remarkable ways. This sculpture, as well as the work of the other five artists, transforms the bike-riding activity by engaging the rider in a more interactive and reflective experience, and by providing the Ventura River Trail with its unique identity.