Red Grooms' Solar Sculptures

We've seen many a sun on Sunday Morning during the course of these past 30 years ... most of them sent in by you, our viewers, for which we thank you.

But when it came to our 30th anniversary, we decided to turn the tables, and commission an artist to create some suns for us.

And who better to capture the sun in all its shades of yellow, gold and red than our old friend Red Grooms?

Red has been an occasional guest on Sunday Morning from almost its earliest days, welcoming us into his world of colorful madcap 3-D creations - "sculpto-pictoramas," he calls them.

Grooms is known for his large scale, intensely colored sculptural pieces, with his famous bright palette and his gift for creating whimsical characters.

In the past we've gone on a sightseeing tour of Red's Ruckus Manhattan ... so big that it took over the entire waiting room at Grand Central Terminal.

We browsed in the bookstore he created for The Hudson River Museum ... and we held on tight at the Ruckus Rodeo he staged in Fort Worth.

Now these past few days we've watched Red hard at work in his studio ... inspired by the example of our own Sunday Morning Sun to design a collection of seven images in honor of our anniversary broadcast.

You can view these creations in the accompanying photo essay.

Time now for the dawn ...