Celebrated British 'snow artist', Simon Beck, has created 175 epic snow drawings over the past decade, and has managed to forge a career out of the unusual artform. Covering an area of around 100 metres by 100 metres, most often in the freshly laid snow of the European Alps, each snowscape requires more than 10 hours work at a time, as Beck walks distances of up to 40 km to complete them.
Talking with Alex Bellos at The Guardian, Beck explains why mathematical drawings such as a Koch snowflake, a Sierpinski triangle or a Mandelbrot set are his favourite things to decorate the snow with. "You can get to drawing much sooner," he says. "You are just following simple rules. You don't have to keep referring to a diagram. You can do it from memory. And they just look the best."
When he heads out to the snow with a mental picture of what he's going to draw, the freelance orienteering mapmaker has nothing but his compass in hand as he counts his paces exactly. "Once you have been going about an hour you get quite a network of tracks going through the area of the drawing and you can get from A to B quite easily," he told Bellos. "You will always end up backtracking because you get hungry to go back to the start to get your food."
Check out some of the images below, including one he made for World Aids Day, which Beck describes as a simple twisted polar grid decorated with male genitals. Beck has just released a book called Snow Art, featuring his best snowscapes, and you can see more images in Bellos's article at The Guardian.
Source: The Guardian
Additional images: Simon Beck