Sarah Luepker, Margaret Hellehgas, Max Gugel-Dawson and Anastasiia Seriukova sawed, chiseled and sanded at a four-foot by six-foot block of snow, rounding out its edges until an eight-foot tall “Cloud Bear” appeared.
Unlike ice sculpting, associated with mechanical tools like chainsaws and Dremels, competition snow sculptors like this group of students from Oak Park and River Forest High School were allowed to use only manual tools.
“We get there, and this thing is rock solid. It’s like a white block of marble,” said Sarah, an 18-year-old senior from Oak Park. “If the snow freezes up really hard, it makes it a little hard to remove snow.”
Those were just some of the obstacles the novice team had to overcome to win first place Feb. 7 in the high school division of the Snow Days Chicago snow sculpture competition at Navy Pier. On their first try, the OPRF team assembled by art teachers Pennie Ebsen and Tracy VanDuinen and coached by Peter Hermann, a professional snow sculptor, beat out four other high school teams.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to lose. We’re the underdogs,'” Sarah said. “When you put that much effort into your work and other people acknowledge it, it makes all the cold feet worth it.”
OPRF, like all the other teams, submitted a design sketch to be admitted to the competition. Though they weren’t able to do any practice runs, the team also molded a clay model of the “Cloud Bear” they hoped to reproduce out of the block of snow.
On Feb. 5, the students started sculpting, continuing the next day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. when the snow sculpture was nearly complete.
Though the students put a tarp over their snow statue, the sun came out on the last day, causing parts to melt before Sarah returned around 6 p.m. to show it to a friend.
“The paw fell, and the face was mushed,” she said.
Chosen because she works primarily in three-dimensional art, Sarah said she usually works alone.
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“There was a while there where we didn’t necessarily trust each other that much,” she admitted. “I got a lot of experience with collaboration. Everyone in the group I knew was talented, but we’d always done our own thing.”
Sarah, who hopes to make studio art one of her majors in college, said she’s up for creating a competitive snow sculpture again in the future.
“If an opportunity comes my way, I will certainly sign up,” she said.
Hermann, who works as a carpenter at OPRF, said he took up snow sculpting about 20 years ago after attending a competition in Lake Geneva, Wis.
“I thought whatever world where they’re doing his, I’ve arrived. I was hooked. This was it,” he said.
A native from the Black Forest area of Germany, Hermann said snow seemed like a natural artistic medium.
“As a kid, I always enjoyed creating things in snow,” he said. “I always looked at snow as free art material. Other people saw it as a nuisance.”
Rebecca R. Bibbs is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.