"This is how God intended mountains to be." Those were the words of U.K. artist Simon Beck in February when he brought his unique style of snow art to Banff National Park for his first artistic exploration of North America. Beck creates perfect, detailed geometrical designs using only a traditional compass, a map drawing and a pair of trusted snowshoes to make well-planned tracks in the snow.
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“This is how God intended mountains to be.”
Those were the words of U.K. artist Simon Beck in February when he brought his unique style of snow art to Banff National Park for his first artistic exploration of North America.
Beck creates perfect, detailed geometrical designs using only a traditional compass, a map drawing and a pair of trusted snowshoes to make well-planned tracks in the snow.
An Internet sensation, Banff Lake Louise Tourism brought him to the national park last month to use his artistic talents and passion for orienteering to design a series of snow art drawings.
Kym Hill with BLLT said the fact Beck has not been to North America yet and with snowshoeing being a classic winter experience in Banff National Park, a partnership with Toque and Canoe (a blog about Canadian travel culture), which had already been in contact with him, was formed to bring him here.
“I think it is really quite an honour as well to be part of project which allows Simon, as a snow artist at this time in his career, to actually come to the Canadian Rockies and be able to completely design on the landscape as he sees fit,” said Hill, adding no direction was provided to Beck with regard to the designs he chose.
Dubbed #ProjectSnow, it included a large snowflake, Beck's largest drawing to date, which he composed on Peyto Lake, took six hours to stomp out in the snow and was 450 metres in size. He is known for his snowflakes and with the videographer from The Upthink Lab, which produced a video montage of the project, an innovative idea to use a light drawing effect with LED to trace and illuminate the snowflake imprint was achieved.
“We thought that was really quite exciting and as far as we know there is nothing that has been done to capture Simon Beck's work like that to date,” Hill said.
Beck then continued his snow art tour to Lake Louise Ski Hill and Sunshine Village, creating a howling wolf and a maple leaf. Hill said as an artist, Beck is known for his geometric work and he had the creative freedom to express his take on the Canadian landscape with the wolf and maple leaf symbols.
“I think it is really nice to see him do something different and still in line with his style,” she said.
BLLT released a video montage by The Upthink Lab of Beck's work on Tuesday (March 10) that captures the creative journey of Beck's latest winter canvas.
Beck, who has a degree in engineering from Oxford and has worked as a cartographer, began his artwork in December 2004 when he was inspired to draw a star on a small lake after skiing and snow art was born. Now he lives in the French Alps and travels the world in search of new landscapes.
Beck starts each design with a careful selection of location that he then surveys for core points of the design. He starts at one of the points and walks to the centre of the design and calculates the distance to each core point. The drawing is composed using a series of lines, arcs and curves by using a compass to determine each angle and finishes the design with snowshoe steps as shading tools.
Go to www.banfflakelouise.com/projectsnow for more information and photos of Beck's experience in the Rockies.
