The Good Life France Magazine January/February 2015 | Page 55

There's No Art like Snow Art

The patterns are not created with tools Simon does it all by… foot.

He walks the patterns into the snow wearing raquettes (snow shoes). Spending hours alone, trudging out the patterns is physically and mentally demanding. Using his mapmaking skills Simon draws the patterns and them maps them using a compass, tape measure and string. “What I would really like would be a means of projecting a spot onto the snow so I could simply create drawings by following it and not have to do any surveying” Simon says.

Some of the patterns are enormous covering thousands of square metres. Most though, are around 100 m² and the average snow drawing takes ten hours, all conducted in freezing weather conditions on fresh snow which Simon says drily “isn’t fun”.

With a head torch he works into the night to complete an artwork, then takes a photograph and saves it to his hugely popular Facebook page.

Hundreds of thousands have followed his progress, enamoured of the breath-taking beauty of a giant snowflake or “Mandelbrot set, Koch curve and Sierpinski triangle”.

Inspiration comes from mathematical patters and geometry, Japanese gardens, even “grumpy cat”. This is art at its most fragile, literally disappearing overnight at times, covered by fresh snow or simply melting away.

The last few years have been

carry on creating. He has also dabbled in sand art, creating patterns on the beach.

difficult as the weather has not been kind to snow artists in the alps and Simon has travelled outside of France to

by janine Marsh