SNOWFLAKES?
NO WAY! SCULPTORS MIX ART SCIENCE; ‘SKYSCRAPING’ IS KEY
It would have to be a mighty cold day in Rockford before park district officials would consider canceling the Illinois State Snow Sculpting Competition. But mainly it would just have to be a snowless one.
Rockford has been at the mercy of meteorology ever since the city began hosting the event 19 years ago, skipping it entirely, in 2003, and postponing it four times.
The fancy, boutique town of Lake Geneva, Wis., where the National Snow Sculpting Championships are taking place Wednesday through Sunday, has access to 15 snowmaking machines (owned by the Grand Geneva resort, one of the sponsors). The event includes helicopter rides, a torchlight parade and musical entertainment. Organizers hardly have to worry at all.
But a snowmaking machine, for once-a-year use, is too frivolous a purchase for a city such as Rockford, where the winning sculpture in the 2004 competition, titled “Progress,” depicted an out-of-work machinist holding a “Will Work For Food” sign.
“We get our snow off the local airport runways,” said Vance Barrie, public relations coordinator for the Rockford Park District, a few days after temporarily postponing this year’s event, because there wasn’t any yet. “You know how you go by a shopping center and there’s a pile of snow pushed into one area? Well the airport runway — that’s a giant parking lot.”
Snow or no snow, Rockford has always had an absolute rock in Fred Gardner, 61, a mechanical engineer from Caledonia who works at Hamilton Sunstrand. “When you hear that thing winding up in a plane, that high-pitched hum? That’s our generator inside that airplane,” he says.
Gardner was there for the very first state championship Rockford staged, back in 1987, after the town bought the right to host the event for $200.
He’d always had artistic aspirations — sculpting in wood and “drawing the caricatures for the retirement posters at work and so forth.” So when a couple of colleagues said they’d sign up with him (snow sculptors compete in teams of three), he figured: Why not?
But today he is the winningest competitor in Illinois state snow-sculpting history, having seized the state competition four times, the nationals once, and even competed in the international symposium outside Montreal (where his team won the People’s Choice award). He and his current team (Hamilton Sunstrand colleagues Will Beard and Paul Larsen) won the 2005 state contest, which means they’ll head to the Nationals in Lake Geneva on Wednesday.
(The winning team of last week’s state contest, captained by Ted Bihlmaier, will compete in the 2007 nationals.)
Some say Gardner’s the best in the business. Gardner says, “There are a lot of good people competing out there.” He will admit to one thing: “I always saw something beyond a snowman made of three big balls.”
Quality has improved
According to Barrie, the level of craftsmanship in Sinnissippi Park, where the contest is held, has come a long way since the early days of the contest. “The first couple of years were pretty crude compared to what they can do today. We were going in blindly. … The teams didn’t know what kind of tools to use.”
But as an engineer and wood sculptor, Gardner had a bit of a jump the first time he and his team attacked the requisite 2-ton, 6-foot-by-6-foot-by-10-foot rectangular block of snow. “This is a lot bigger than a block of wood,” Gardner says. “So we made some giant versions of chisels and sculpting tools.”
Typical tools of the craft include trowels, barbed wire, axes, hammers and even machetes, but after making a sketch and then a 15- to 16-inch clay model of their subject, “I make tools that I think would be appropriate to accomplish it,” he says. For instance, he once designed an implement expressly for making the snow look like the bark on a tree.
“Oh, you learn,” says Gardner. “It’s pretty obvious when you’re out there what you’re up against,” he says.
The sun, for instance. It doesn’t take more than one melting incident to figure out that you need to protect your work during the day, using tarps, or that a giraffe might not be the best idea (“it has spindly legs so it’s not going to support the mass of the rest of the body”), or that leaving the fine details — your chimp’s face, for instance — until the final night of sculpting is smart in two ways: The material holds together better in the colder air, and pre-judging sun exposure is thus kept to a minimum.
When the snow did finally arrive this year, at the last minute possible (park officials needed 3 inches by Jan. 23; they got 5 Jan. 20), it meant not only that Rockford would be able to pick a 2006 state champ and that the economy-stimulating crowds would arrive to see the sculptures — it also meant a tremendous amount of work.
Setting up
Early last Tuesday morning, a crew of truck drivers gathered 40 loads of airport snow and dumped them in Sinnissippi Park. Workers painstakingly transformed the stuff into a more than a dozen 2-ton, 6-foot-by-6-foot-by-10-foot rectangular sculpting blocks — one for each of the three-member teams competing this year — as well as mini-blocks (4-foot-by-4-foot-by-6-foot), for the high school teams.
“Usually, we do it a week ahead of time; this time we did it in a day,” Barrie said.
A front-end loader dropped a big chunk of snow into a plywood and angle-iron-steel mold (basically a hinged wooden box without a bottom), then workers climbed up a ladder and into the box and marched around on it. More loading, more stomping, and when it was full and properly packed, a crane lifted the mold and carried it to another spot to begin again.
It’s time-consuming and exhausting, but according to Gardner, the actual sculpting can be, too. While ice sculpture relies on the cutting away of material (and allows the use of power tools), artists who sculpt in snow like to build their medium up. “You start with a 10-foot block, but oftentimes the pieces end up a lot taller than that.”
“When I’m doing the detail of some of the taller features, I’ll be up and down that ladder 75 or 80 times,” says Gardner. “By the time you’re done with it, you’re pretty much bushed, especially after three days in a row, 14 to 16 hours a day, with the last day running straight through the night,” he said.
“The maximum use of snow is definitely to your advantage,” Gardner says. Which is something he’ll probably keep in mind while competing in Lake Geneva this week, on the pristine, manmade snow that town is able to provide. But somehow, in Rockford, it seems an even more important maxim to keep in mind.
“The parks department worked so hard to create that block,” Gardner says, ” . . . you certainly want to make sure you use it.”
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ernunn@tribune.com
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Best of the (frozen) best
The National Snow Sculpting Championships are considered the pinnacle of the season.
“These are the best of the best snow sculptors in America,” says George Hennerley, executive vice president of the Lake Geneva Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has sponsored the event for the past 11 years.
The competition is “self-judged,” and offers no cash prize. But “we foot a $60,000 bill each year to house and feed the three-member teams that make it to the nationals — all they have to do is pay for their plane tickets; we even pick them up at the airport,” said Hennerley on the day the bureau was at work on making the sculpting blocks along the banks of Lake Geneva.
The sculpting “blocks” at the national level are actually cylinders, which measure 8 feet in height and 6 feet in diameter and weigh about 3 tons. “We make them with a three-piece fiberglass mold that is very light and zippy, but we use the same old method of filling it and stomping it down,” Hennerley says.
The competition is limited to 15 teams, most made up of artists from the chillier states. This year New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Alaska, Wyoming, Maine and Idaho are sending competitors. That, obviously, doesn’t add up to 15. But sometimes, “if Colorado can’t come, for instance, we’ll fill in with two teams from Illinois, two from Wisconsin. . . . Alaska is always pretty dependable — they get a lot of practice,” Hennerley says.
Five or six years ago, Florida sent a team, he adds. “They took second place. . . . Apparently, sand sculpting has some similarities to snow sculpting.”
— Emily Nunn
