0
0 Artist Simon Beck is known for his incredible snow drawings that span between 100 and 150 metres in diameter. He creates them armed only with a magnetic compass and his snowshoes.
Taking a ski lift to a remote mountain, walking for up to 10 hours in thick snow to draw huge geometric patterns only to see them disappear with the next snowfall. A normal day for 60-year-old Simon Beck.
With a total of 365 drawings in the snow and around 200 in the sand, at locations all over the world, Beck’s art is one of a kind.
An accidental artist
The University of Oxford-educated engineer and former cartographer left his native England 15 years ago to settle in Les Arcs, a ski resort in the Tarentaise Valley in the French Alps.
The idea of making snow drawings came to him after a day of skiing. With energy left to spare, he spotted a frozen lake covered in fresh snow. He grabbed his surveying compass, measured five points around a central point and joined the dots, creating a five-pointed star. His first-ever snow art.
“I’m very lucky that I found something I liked doing and actually get a certain amount of money for it … enough to live anyway,” says Beck.
For Beck, the ephemeral nature of his art is an integral part of his approach.
“What I do, really, is graffiti. And there are people who think it is graffiti, they don’t actually like it. I would not do this were it not for the fact that nature is going to completely remove it.”
