Meet the Former Engineer Who Makes Mind-Blowing Land Art With Nothing But a Pair of Snow Shoes and Some Simple Math

Earlier this month, in the
saddles of the Rocky Mountains near Silverthorne, Colorado,
intricate artworks the size of football fields started cropping up
across enormous fields of snow, as if overnight.

From a distance, they look like
geometric doodles, the kind you make by drawing simple fractal
shapes. And in fact,
that’s more or less how these ephemeral artworks were
made.

The elaborate installations are
the work of one man, Simon Beck, who charts out detailed designs
with simple math, then realizes them by walking in the
snow.

And they’re not done at night.
They’re usually done over the course of a day (if not several), and
the steps, if he counted them, would surely tally in the tens of
thousands. 

Beck, a former engineer from
London who now lives partly in the French Alps, has been in
Silverthorne since early January. The resort town commissioned him
to trot out his artworks onto the winter landscape for two weeks,
in a kind of Rocky Mountain residency. But conditions thus far
haven’t been ideal. 

“The main memory I’ll take with
me is the soft snow, the way it blows around in even a light wind,”
Beck told Artnet News over the phone. He was calling from a site in
mountains, battling the wind and coughing from the cold. “It hasn’t
been like it is at home in the Alps.”

Days into
his Silverthorne stint,
Beck has only finished a couple of “drawings,” as he calls them.
The wind has thus far wiped away everything he started, and on some
days has even prevented him from going out altogether. But that’s
the nature of the job, and he’s used to it. 

He says the question he gets
asked most often is whether he gets frustrated by the temporariness
of his creations, which can take him an entire day to make, but can
be destroyed in just moments with a change of the
weather.

“As long as the weather holds
long enough for us to get pictures, I consider it a job well done,”
the artist says. 

Beck first started making his
snow drawings in 2004. It started out as a kind of exercise: he
would place a marker in an open patch of snow, a nucleus around
which he would chart a series of equidistant points, then he would
connect the points with his own tracks and patterns would
emerge.

In 2010, he launched a Facebook page to share the fruits of his
new hobby. The aerial photos of his drawings, taken from a drone or
adjacent mountainside, gained widespread attention
online.

Meanwhile, the drawings grew
more and more complex, covering hundreds, then thousands of square
feet. His largest piece to date—a four-leaf clover on a frozen
reservoir in France—was the size of six soccer fields. It took him
32 hours across four days to complete. 

Overall, Beck has created
several hundred snow drawings around the world. (He has also
experimented with sand.) His Facebook page boasts over 284,000
followers, and patrons—like those in the city of Silverthorne—pay
him to travel around the world to make his work. 

See more examples of his work
below.

The post Meet the Former Engineer Who Makes Mind-Blowing
Land Art With Nothing But a Pair of Snow Shoes and Some Simple
Math appeared first on artnet News.