Marilyn Monroe Snow Portrait in Changchun, China: Art Made by Shovel

When the first heavy snow of December 2015 covered a university football field in Changchun, in north-east China, a group of students picked up shovels and turned it into a giant portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Seen from the ground it looked like random patches of cleared turf. From above, the most famous face of 1950s Hollywood looked back at the sky.

Photographs of the portrait ran in news galleries on December 8, 2015, including Voice of America’s photo coverage, which describes university students creating the image by clearing snow off a soccer field in Changchun, Jilin province. The campus was reported at the time as Changchun University of Technology.

How the Marilyn Monroe snow portrait works

The students drew by subtraction. Every dark area of the face, the shadows under the brows, the eyes and the lips, is ground where the snow was scraped away. Every highlight is untouched snow. Artists call this working with negative space: the material you remove defines the picture as much as the material you leave.

The technique suits a portrait like Marilyn’s because her best-known image is already a study in strong contrast: platinum curls, dark eyes and lips, a pale face. Reduce it to two tones and it stays instantly recognisable, which is exactly what a snow drawing needs.

Why the view from above matters

Up close, a drawing the size of a football pitch falls apart into separate shapes. Your eye cannot take in the whole thing at once, and the angle of view squashes the proportions. From a high window or a rooftop, the pieces come together and the white field around the face acts as a frame.

Snow artists use the same principle around the world. Simon Beck draws with nothing but footprints, Sonja Hinrichsen walks vast patterns into open snowfields and Jim Denevan laid out giant circles on frozen Lake Baikal. Each designs for a viewer far above the work.

Marilyn Monroe, a lasting icon

The choice of subject says a lot about Monroe’s reach. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, she became the leading screen star of the 1950s in films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire (both 1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959). She died in 1962 at the age of 36. The American Film Institute ranks her sixth among the greatest female screen legends of classic Hollywood, and more than half a century later students on the other side of the world could still recognise her from a few dark shapes in the snow.

Changchun, a snowy city in north-east China

Changchun is the capital of Jilin province, on the Songliao Plain, with about nine million people in its wider municipality. Its name means “long spring”, but its winters run from about November to March and are cold, windy and dry, with a January average of −14.3 °C. Snow is usually light, falling on about 38 days a year, which makes a deep first snowfall worth celebrating.

The city is China’s historic car capital, home of carmaker FAW, and from 1932 to 1945 it served as Hsinking, the capital of the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo. Winter visitors come for cross-country skiing too: the annual Vasaloppet China race is held at Jingyuetan National Forest Park, and Changchun hosted the 2007 Asian Winter Games.

Try a snow drawing of your own

Sketch the design first on paper using only dark shapes, then step back across the room: if it reads from a distance, it will read in the snow. Choose a flat, open space with a high viewpoint nearby, and mark a simple grid with sticks before you start clearing. Snow and bare ground are all you need.

For snow art that builds upwards, see the Bartz brothers’ giant snow octopus and our animal-inspired snow sculptures. For another cleared line that reads differently from above, watch the winding path in Janitor’s Revenge.

Related reading

• Simon Beck’s Snow Dragon: Drawing with Footprints
• 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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