The Iceman Carveth

2/9/2010
By Jim Brown

What’s wrong with this picture? You work all year in a state with more below freezing days than not, saving up money and vacation days and what do you do with both? You take time off in the winter to play with snow and/or ice, sometimes even flying or driving to even colder locations. Sounds a little insane, doesn’t it? Well, if you were to ask my friends or relatives, they would concur with you: I’m nuts.

My fascination with the frozen arts started when I was just a little guy. I started by making the more traditional three tier snowman but after a while this just seemed a bit boring so I decided to brighten things up a bit by throwing electricity into the mix. I would carve deeply into the figures to embed the wiring and sockets so that only the lighted bulbs would show. Two blue ones for the eyes, a single red one for the nose and several yellow ones for the mouth. In hind site I’m thinking that maybe my parents didn’t like me very much. The thought of letting any of my children play in wet snow while splicing energized electrical wires just doesn’t sound real safe to me.

I obviously I survived this experimentation and as I grew so did the size and complexity of my frozen creations. I went through phases where I painted the snow, formed the snow and even used appliances to act as skeletal structures inside of my snow art.
Years later after driving by a sign announcing the coming of a snow sculpture competition, I convinced a business associate of mine as well as a brother-in-law to enter this event with me. We conjured up a beautiful scene of wild Alaskan animals cavorting in a hot tub while enjoying various beverages. (Still one of my favorites.) Having never competed before in such a contest, we were keenly unaware of the tools other participants used. Where our competitors used saws fashioned out of barbed wire to cut eight foot blocks of snow in half, we used little and largely ineffective wood saws. While they had horse curries to smooth the shapes, we used spoons and putty knives. Our real claim to fame was the fact that almost the entire surface of our piece was finished with an icy glaze largely due to the heat of my two partners’ hands. I suppose that this is the real reason why they no longer wanted to help me.

After competing in snow carving events for many more years and winning not only several state championships but also two national events, I was lured to try my hand at ice.The city of Anchorage was hosting an international ice sculpting contest downtown in front of our Performing Arts Center complex. I had just befriended another snow carver who, like me, had never tried ice but was equally fascinated by it. I paid the entry fee and on the first day of the event met my partner in front of the ice allotted us for the ceremonial start at 9:00am. The mayor of Anchorage fired off a starter pistol and announced “Gentlemen, start your engines” (meaning chainsaws). Let me tell you, it was pandemonium all around. Sculptors from all corners of the world were busy sketching various images on their blocks while others were sawing away huge piles of shavings. Yes, everywhere people were scurrying, everywhere that is except where my partner and I sat. We just looked at each other blankly because neither of us had a clue as to what we would make. We finally left to go to a shopping mall for inspiration and then to a hardware store to buy a few essential items like a really cheap chain saw and hatchet. Returning, we set about chipping and sawing our two five thousand pound blocks of ice into a medieval looking castle atop a rocky spire which was connected by a drawbridge to another mountainous outcrop. The key was in the details because the steps leading up to the castle along with the bridge were really the scales of a serpent’s back.
This competition was in truth an endurance contest because it went nonstop from Friday morning until 4:00pm Sunday afternoon. Once finished we barely had enough time to go home, shower, change clothes and get back for the awards dinner. During our meal the organizers put on a beautiful slide show set to music which depicted everything from where and how the ice was harvested out of a pond in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the finished pieces. What my partner and I enjoyed most were the hourly progress shots that were taken of each team's work. Hour one: teams A through Y - busy roughing out the sculpture. Team Z (us): nothing happening. Hour two: teams A through Y - creating things that are starting to become recognizable. Team Z: yes, us once again, nothing happening. This went on for several more rounds giving some in attendance the feeling that team Z had given up and gone home. Finally after a several hours of giving the other teams a head start, team Z took the field.
This photo montage went on for thirty-some minutes and at its completion, our Master of Ceremonies took the mic and proceeded to announce the winners, from third place to first. Taking third was the team from France who had sculpted a beautiful and quite lifelike human female form. Second was a Japanese duo, who created a beautiful undersea world complete with sharks and scuba divers. At this point both my partner and I were trying to decide which team had won. I was sure it was the Chinese team but my cohort was leaning towards the South Americans. The time finally arrived when the M.C. announced that the winners were--- my partner and I. Our wives were with us and it’s a good thing because someone needed to pick us up off the floor. We really couldn’t believe we’d won.

It was not because I’d won an international ice carving event that caused me to fall in love with this medium, it was simply what I’d seen and learned. Ice, especially that natural ice out of the deepest, darkest and coldest regions in Alaska is truly magical. When harvested and polished, you can actually read a newspaper through slabs four feet thick. If it’s extremely cold outside, say a typical winter day in Fairbanks of about 20 below zero, you cannot use any heat source near the ice or it will crack just like an ice cube does when you drop it into a soda. The only way to polish the ice is to use side mount sander with a Scotch-Bright pad. As you work it, the sounds emitted will be eerily like that of fine lead crystal.
The strength of the ice is what totally intrigues me. A few years ago, my team created all the title characters from the Ice Age movie so we needed to make some rather large Mastodon tusks. These weighed somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds. After heaving these into position on opposing sides of Manny’s trunk, we squeaked a few drops of water between the two surfaces and within seconds the tusks were bonded together.

Although I don’t have time to do every event like I used to, I do try and fit in one or two every year. The Crystal Gallery of Ice held here in Anchorage annually is a convenient and fun competition which is too close to home to pass up. This year my original idea of Tiger Woods ducking a swinging golf club being wielded by his wife was nixed by the review committee for possibly being too controversial. Instead I put together a rather gratifying rendition of an American soldier paying homage to a fallen comrade. Some years, like this one, the work takes second fiddle compared to the interaction with other sculptors and the viewing public. Truth be told, most of us are egomaniacs and love nothing better than showing off and talking up our craft. This year while carving away, I noticed a very persistent photographer who not only took lots of shots of my work but also of me. After several minutes of this I decided to have a little fun with this photog and excused myself while I fished something out of my pocket. Once in hand I proceeded to pop my plastic Billy Bob Teeth into my mouth and gave this photographer my best gnarly-toothed grin. This antic cracked up my new friend and soon he was taking more pictures of me with my dentally challenged mouth. Too bad I didn’t ask him what he did for a living before I pulled such a prank because it turns out that he is one of our local newspaper’s staff photographers. Imagine my reluctance towards opening the following morning’s paper. He was either a saint for not posting those photos or he’s waiting until I hit the lottery to blackmail me. The real story is that I will probably do the same thing or something more bizarre in the future. It must have something to do with spending so much time out in the cold. Can’t somebody out there line me up for a sand sculpture event? I hear they host these where it’s warm…