When snow becomes a canvas: How one artist creates colossal masterpieces using a compass, snowshoes

For British artist Simon Beck, snow is a pristine canvas on which he creates intricate, large-scale geometric designs.

Beck, who works mostly by commission in the Les Arcs ski resort in the French Alps, has completed about 240 snow drawings in the past 12 years. He creates his drawings, which are based on fractal patterns such as the Koch snowflake and the Sierpinksi triangle, by walking the equivalent of 12 to 19 miles (20 to 30 km) in a pair of snowshoes.

For Beck, an Oxford graduate who previously worked as an engineer and a mapmaker, becoming a “snow artist” wasn’t part of a grand plan. One day after skiing, he said, he looked outside his apartment window at Les Arcs and spontaneously created a star design by walking in the snow.

“It started as a bit of a joke 12 years ago, but seven years ago, I decided to take it seriously and make it my main form of activity during the winter in addition to skiing,” he said.

In addition to being a means of staying in shape, Beck said he creates his snow art to make people aware of the potentially devastating effects of climate change.

“There’s also an environmental message,” he said. “Snow is beautiful; we need snow. We need winter and we shouldn’t wreck it too much.”

The ideal conditions for creating snow drawings, Beck said, include snow that is “about 9 inches deep, which is really quite soft and has a firm surface beneath the snow.”

He prefers to work on a snow-covered frozen lake, which he said lends itself better to photos because of its level surface. And skiers generally don’t venture on frozen lakes, he added, so he can work uninterrupted.

To bring his designs to life, Beck works out from the center with an orienteering compass. Next, he determines the appropriate distances on his designs by counting paces. Each line is made from his individual paces. He adds in the remaining lines and shadings by eye.

“I do as much as I can in one day,” he said. “In average conditions, it takes about 10 hours before getting too tired to carry on.”

Since Beck’s designs have an ephemeral life span, he takes photos immediately after completing the drawings. He said that they usually stay in place until the next heavy snowfall, which has ranged from eight hours to eight weeks.

Beck, who has an international Facebook following of 280,000 and sells high-resolution copies of his photos to magazines and websites, is looking to expand his horizons.

Among the places he would like to take his art are Yosemite National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Central Park reservoir in New York City. He would also like to experiment in city neighborhoods and football stadiums.

During the off-season, Beck has started to make sand drawings on beaches in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He uses a rake to draw his designs, which are washed away the next day by encroaching tides. The main difference between snow and sand art, he said, is that in the sand, “you can walk all over the drawing without making any mark that shows you’ve been there.”

“It makes it a lot easier to do the measuring and you can do a lot more ambitious drawings as a result.”

In 2014, Beck released “Snow Art,” a compilation of 200 of his snow drawings. The book is available for purchase online at snowart.gallery.

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