Up close it is just a field of trampled snow. From above, the footprints resolve into a dragon coiled inside a giant circle. British snow artist Simon Beck made the creature in Yakutsk, Siberia, for a film then in production called Drakony, and photographs of it went round the world in November 2015.
Who is Simon Beck?
Beck was born in London in 1958, studied civil engineering at Oxford and worked for years as a cartographer. He began making snow drawings in 2004 and around 2009 left mapmaking to do it full time, moving to the French Alps. He is often called the world’s first snow artist, and by 2020 he had made about 330 snow drawings and 120 sand drawings. A documentary, Simon Beck – Snowartist, followed his work in 2016.
His commissions have taken him to Banff National Park in Canada, Powder Mountain in Utah and the Great Northern festival in Minnesota, as well as to Siberia. For an introduction to his geometric murals, see Simon Beck’s Snowshoe Murals: Drawing a Design by Walking.
How Simon Beck draws with snowshoes
Beck works on snowshoes, using a compass to lay out his designs on a fresh, flat snowfield. Each footprint compresses the snow and changes how it catches the light, so walked areas appear darker or textured beside the smooth untouched surface. A typical session lasts five to nine hours, sometimes ten, and the larger pieces involve walking up to 30 miles.
The cartographer’s training shows. A map has to stay coherent over a large area while the person drawing it sees only a small part at a time, and a snow drawing is the same problem at full scale: Beck must keep the whole design in his head while standing inside it.
The Yakutsk snow dragon
The dragon sits inside a ring of shaded snow, its outline kept crisp by leaving the surrounding surface untouched. Only from the air, or from a high viewpoint, do the thousands of steps merge into a single image.
Yakutsk is a fitting place for winter art. The capital of the Sakha Republic stands on the Lena River and is the coldest city of more than 200,000 people in the world, with an average January temperature of about −37 °C and a record low of −64.4 °C. It is also the largest city built on continuous permafrost, with many houses resting on concrete piles. In winter the frozen Lena becomes a road.
Light and the life of a snow drawing
Low sun is a snow artist’s best friend. At sunset, the shadows in each footprint deepen and the walked areas stand out strongly against smooth snow; under flat, overcast light the same drawing can almost disappear. Wind, sun and fresh snowfall begin erasing the work as soon as it is finished, so the photographs are the only lasting record.
You can try the idea on a small scale on any fresh, flat snowfield you have access to: walk a large circle around a fixed point using a rope or measured steps, then fill one half with close-packed footprints and view it from a balcony or a slope above.
For more art made from snow, see Marilyn Monroe Drawn in Snow: An Overhead Portrait in Changchun and The Bartz Brothers’ Giant Snow Octopus and Other Sea Creatures.
Related reading
- Raised Footprints in Snow: When the Surface Around a Step Disappears
- Cryoconite Holes: Small Habitats on a Glacier Surface
- Sonja Hinrichsen’s Snow Drawings: Six Stages of a Growing Project
- Jim Denevan’s 2010 Lake Baikal Snow Circles: Geometry on a Frozen Lake
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