Simon Beck is back at his winter home at Les Arcs, the French ski resort, stomping more extraordinary designs into the snowy landscape. Beck, a self-employed map-maker from the south of England, laboriously paces out his complicated artworks, spending about 10 hours on each. Then he takes a photograph or two…and waits for his masterpiece to be covered by a fresh blanket of snow or melted as winter turns to spring.
It’s hard to say what’s more alluring here: the originality of his ambition, the combination of fine detail and monumental scale, or the evanescence of the result. Like Native American or Tibetan sand paintings, these snow drawings are made to be impermanent.
So thanks, Simon Beck. Like we needed one more reminder that beauty is fleeting. That nothing good lasts.
For more examples of this breathtaking and ultimately depressing art, visit Simon’s Facebook page, Simon Beck’s Snow Art. When we happened on Beck’s work last year, his Facebook page had around 14,000 “Likes.” Since then, he’s bumped up to 32,000, which in Internet terms means he’s still a closely held secret.
So “Like” him. In a world where Newtown conspiracy theories and “girl fail” videos go viral, it would be nice to see something like this catch fire. So to speak.
Beck’s photo of his latest work, created January 23, from his Facebook page.
