Armed with a rake and a stick, Jim Denavan hangs out on the beaches of California creating some of the largest scale artwork on the planet. Besides the ex-surfers love for the sand, he is also the chef behind a hugely successful campaign for alfresco dining that takes him to the tops of mountains and the middle of deserts.

Hello Jim. It must be difficult creating such large works in public areas.

It's funny actually. People often don't realise what I'm doing because the drawings are so large and they just put their towels down in the middle. Or I've had people have volleyball games on them. People think I'm just a strange man with a stick but it's just funny to me. I can't rope off a section of beach two football fields long so I welcome people interacting with my work.

How did you get started with this art form?

I've always lived near the beach because I'm a surfer. My first experience was going for a stroll on the sand at a time of day when the light hits it at just the right angle and it looks beautiful. I made a 15 foot fish with my finger, then before I knew it I had covered 300 feet with all kinds of people and animals. After I looked at them all from a clifftop above I knew that I would pursue this. The simplicity is attractive to me, I just walk out of my house with a stick and my finger.

How is the Nevada project coming along? Is that your most extraordinary project to date?

Definitely and I'm sure it's the largest artwork ever made. It's been two months and it has a circumference of nine miles, wider than the island of Manhattan. Every line is 27 feet wide. That part of Nevada is the largest perfectly flat area in the world and very quiet, although it is an approved area for amateur rocket scientists. It got quite lonely while I was living there and it confused me that there weren't any tides, but I got around that by making lots of my friends go out there and live with me. Now I get emails from people who see it from commercial flights.

Jim's Nevada desert project

You're also a professional chef. How did Outstanding In The Field come about?

My older brother is a farmer and pioneer of the organic fruits movement. He grows apples and pears. He's 14 years older than me. I worked on his farm. Then I became a chef and I go to a farmer's markets twice a week. Outstanding In The Field is an effort to promote local farms as well as being an enjoyable experience. We're celebrating agriculture. We've gone all over the country and we have 30,000 people on the members list that come to the dinners of which 40 percent are from different states. I think the best one was up the top of Clark Mountain. We had a table of 150 people with a 360 degree view over the whole of Marine County.

See more of Jim's incredible work here, or click here for more on the essential outdoor dining experience