Weatherworks series links: ‘24 | ‘23 | ‘22 | ‘21 | ‘20 | ‘19 | ‘18 | ‘17 | ‘16 | ’15 | ‘14
The 2025 snow land art was unusual — Mother Nature helped make four iterations of the work: the dry colors on snow; then wet snow overtop the colors (which I skied to shape); then water from heavy rain on clear ice; then a freeze with the artwork under ice (Somewhat in that order below). Signed editioned sets of prints of all seasons are available, various sizes. (Or contact for details).
Below are prints of the work as it evolved over the days across weather. (More images coming)
Weatherworks sets (examples, more available):
Skiing a Painting
Every winter I make a large artwork on a frozen bay. The process is always led by the weather. The water has to be frozen for a few days and then get gessoed by a snowfall. The work day has to be at least partially sunny (otherwise I can’t document the art for prints). It can’t be too blustery — last year, gale force winds erased the earthwork even as I was making it (imagine Rauschenberg undoing a de Kooning drawing, but 1000 times bigger, at 60 mph, and at -20 degrees.) One year the water never froze. Another time on my “go” day it suddenly poured rain. Even with satellites, apps and AI it’s hard to guess the weather. So I flow with the go.
This winter the weather was even more unpredictable, but one morning the conditions were mostly okay, so I went for it. (Flashforward — the “completed” work survived days instead of the usual few hours, and it evolved across snow, slush, rain, a refreeze, and scouring winds. See below).
My rule for doing the land art is to use what’s around — wind, snow, icicles, bullrushes, etc. The first year I arranged fallen branches on the snow and used the wind to drift fireplace ash over them in monochromatic washes, then removed the wood to leave calligraphic negative (white) strokes. Snow sumi-e. I used the same technique another time, but with vintage lace tablecloths (locally sourced from an old drawer). One year I found some free-range cardboard, which I knelt on to compress and melt the topmost layer of snow. As a result, portions of the lower drifted shapes became slightly blurred — it was the analog version of using a selective Gaussian filter in Photoshop. Another time I placed (and balanced on) beams of junk lumber to get hard or glitched edges. I added coloured powder at some point, and have endusted the snow — and myself — ever since. (Coal miners suffer with black lung but I celebrate with pink lung). One dumb time I duct-taped blocks to my feet — for six hours — in order to conceal my footprints. (Yes, I fell and conked my head. Art is a tough sport.)
This year I used a shovel for the first time. I drifted and layered colors across a 40 x 30 foot area, then dragged and shifted the shovel across the surface for hours and hours and colder hours. I hadn’t pre-planned it, but I realized it was similar to squeegeeing a gigantic arctic Gerhard Richter “Abstraktes Bild” into existence. I finally finished around 3:30 in the afternoon. Sixty minutes later the painting disappeared, whitewashed by a heavy snowfall.
So the next day the bay was back to being a massive blank white canvas. Just after sunrise I went out to investigate. Someone had cross-country skied (unknowingly) right over the location of the art. A single pair of skinny ski tracks — barely visible in the vast white — that came from the distant right abruptly transformed into two sharp lines of messy blues, reds, oranges and magentas for about thirty feet… only to become nearly unnoticeable again in the snow as the tracks drew away to the far left horizon.
I raced to get my skis. For the next few hours, I straight-strided the shit out of the area above the weatherwork. And, because it made the “underpainting” colors reveal more, I had to do it mostly going backwards.
At some point I broke up the skied Barnett Newman-ish zips by traversing across the parallel lines. By the end the work seemed like something done by Jean-Paul Riopelle, but, like, if he had been an Olympic Nordic skier. With OCD.
All the above effort was undone by a big rainstorm the next day. I ventured out in the downpour to watch the process. The water mixed the colors, and gave the the surface a high-gloss sheen like a varnished canvas. There was no more physical work to be done — if you don’t count standing on your tippy toes on the top of a 10’ ladder, stretching way out with one arm holding a heavy selfie-stick as high as you can in blasting wind while being soaked by driving rain, as work. (Mother Nature is the best strength and conditioning coach).
Usually I shoot the weatherworks at angles to obfuscate scale, conditions, and materials. (With closer observation though you can see details, like the occasional leaf, or fishing hut in the distance, or a footprint, or ripples or raindrops as just above). For some of this year’s shots I decided to not crop out my boots, skates, skis or, (below) the ladder, to hint at the process (and scale) of the artwork.
It rained all day, and then froze overnight…
So the next day I skated the painting.
At night too.
The next day I was on the ice again. I heard a loud crack and watched a fissure travel through the painting and right beneath my feet. Often while working I hear huge low booms and high long rings from the ice as it tectonically shifts. I always keep an eye on the ice-hut fishermen — you can see them in the distance in the upside-down skied photo above — and if they stayed off the ice, or left, so did I. They weren’t there the night I took the above night-shot though. In the dark the ice was very, very loud, and it was still crazy windy. (What would happen if I fell through? Art is a dangerous sport).
The last photographs I took were on an extremely cold day, just hours before heading back to the city. I could barely stand for the damned wind, and kept being pushed backwards by its force. I turned my head, and my glasses flew 200 feet down the ice. They got caught on a snow patch, thankfully, but it was rapidly being scoured away by the wind. The only way to get the glasses was to slide past the patch, drop down, and roll back up to them. (The wind had blown me wayyyy past them. So tummy, back, tummy back, for some time, rolling all the way up to the eroding snow patch. Soooo far. Art is an embarrassing sport).
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NOTES:
tangentially related to the above: a professor/researcher at one of the top universities in Japan just contacted me to use images of my recombinant paintings, sculptures, and installations in her paper about culture, society and technology (art is a beautiful science). Here’s one of the “fixed” painterly ones — you can see the similar linear approach as the skied earthwork above (including some tectonic cracks); what you can’t see is in the below pic is that from an oblique angle, reds, oranges, pinks and purples suddenly reveal in the painting… also like in the snow works. (Everything is connected…)
THE ABOVE IS FROM THE K.I.A. substack about the art; subscribe HERE
all images of the weather artworks ©Kirby Andersen (K.I.A.)