Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow: January 1

After a while away from blogging and properly celebrating graduating from NYU with a while off, I hope everyone had the happiest of holidays. I spent the past two days moving from New York to Boston where I’ll be writing for artscope magazine in the spring, and so far the quiet and rest from the city have been so so serene.

It’s been snowing here for a while now. Watching the tiny flakes drift down when the wind isn’t blowing them to bits makes for a calm cozy window on the world. Snow globes seem silly compared to the real thing. The weather has forced me to wonder about snow as a medium for creation… Of course it has to be temporary or only captured in photographs like any other kind of landscape or site-specific art. But to me, snow seems more democratic – after all, anyone who’s lived in a snowy place has at least attempted to make their own snowman or snow angel outline, and each one is somehow unique to the hands that packed and molded it.

From Simon Beck’s Facebook page here.

Simon Beck is one of the few people actually considered a “snow artist.” His work has been featured on the Huffington Post and the Daily Mail – large-scale geometric shapes he walks through the snow and photographs from above that make for very impressive frosty designs. He’s from southern England and says he began making the designs “as a bit of fun” in 2004 after he bought an apartment Les Arcs, a ski resort in Savoie, France. Each design requires Beck to walk in the snow for 10 hours, and functions as a creative extension of his career as an orienteering mapmaker. You can read more about what it takes to make these designs in his Q&A on his Facebook page here.