C3 – A tale of two artists

San Francisco Bay in the summer is a sailor’s playground. On any given weekend hundreds of boats emerge to play in the Bay’s famous ‘wind machine’. It’s easy to find yourself trading tacks with a square rigger one minute, a wingfoiler the next, followed by a classic schooner, maybe a heavy displacement cruiser, or any number of racing fleets bashing around the buoys. None of them turns heads like C3…

The slender hull gliding through the chop, powered by a single, gigantic, black batwing of a mainsail, is at once beautiful and a bit sinister. Closer inspection as she hisses by reveals a freestanding carbon mast, wishbone boom and… are those horns on the back? Imaginative passers-by might picture Batman himself at the helm. The more refined might imagine kinetic sculpture at its finest. Both notions would amuse owner Charles Ray, who knows a thing or two about perception and art. For most of the last 50-odd years he has been a worldrenowned modernist sculptor and for 30 of those years also Professor of Sculpture at a rather well-known California university.