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.

From Simon Beck’s Facebook page.

And in honor of all fun snow can be, enjoy all the snow-art below and have such a beautiful beginning to 2013:

From Randomness of This Guy here.

From Imperfections here.

From Lucia Liliana Tudor here.

From Ben Rogers Blog here.

From Instant Joy here.

From Art Prize here.

From A Different Type of Art here.

From Life Stuff here.

It’s hard for me to even mention the horrific tragedy that happened on Friday at an elementary school of all places, but I think it’s really important that we all express how disgusted we are with it so something can actually change this time. I wanted to voice my opinion on the matter, but a Google search of “anti-gun violence paintings” almost made me throw up. This is the saddest, most avoidable event that happens every day in America now. In fact, 15 of the past 24 worst mass shootings in the world over the last 50 years have happened in the United States.

This is an issue that needs to be fixed before more children are put in danger by someone desperate who should not have lawful access to a weapon capable of killing. So I’ve found a selection of artworks to calm our minds and our hearts, because those little children are precious and they deserved to live in a world more like these paintings.

“Open Book,” found here.

In Ezra Klein’s fantastic Washington Post piece about how we can go about making our world safer he writes, “Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. “Too soon,” howl supporters of loose gun laws. But as others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t “too soon.” It’s much too late.” 

Digital art by William J. Thompson, found here.

From Academy Art, found here.

Found on Blogspot here.

From Daily Painters found here.

Ivan Aivazovsky, “Clouds Above a Sea Calm,” 1889, from Wikipaintings found here.

“Looking Back,” digital art found here.

“Calm Sunset” by Leonid Afremov, from Fine Art America, found here

“Kingfisher,” found here.

“Quiet Moment,” by Christopher Clark, found here.