Arriving on the train from Turin just a few kilometers across the French border into the small town of Modane we had to wait for about an hour for the autobus that was operated by the French train service to take us to St. Michel de Maurienne, the town at the bottom of the valley below the ski resort of Valloire where Steuart Bremner, my partner in life and Limitless Idea Project, was to make an ice sculpture.Valloire is a big expanse of mountain offering skiing to mostly French families. The far south side of the ski area dumps skiers into the little hamlet of Les Verneys where the blocks of ice where waiting for Steuart.
After a great dinner with the mayor of the town, the director of the tourism office and his staff, and all the sculptors' lots were drawn determining each artist's position in the line of snow bases. Each just over a meter high, stood naked when we all went out after dinner to start work. A pile of ice blocks totaling 1 meter x 1 meter by ½ meter, rested on the ground under tarps. Ice sculpting happens mostly at night because the sun can penetrate the ice, turn it white and eventually shatter it.
Artists from India, Holland, Italy Steuart from the U.S. and several regions of France all began that night's work after several glasses of wine and a great meal of pate, then a small beefsteak and fries, followed by cheese and a custard desert, by leveling the snow base. Those who were going to carve the ice as if it were a piece of stone joined two, three of four of the ¼ meter thick sheets together so they would be solidly frozen together by the next day. Everyone worried about how they would deal with the seams that are inevitable. Except Steuart. He was planning to assemble his sculpture.
I'd already given my gloves to one of the Indian men who really had very little idea of what it would be like to make a sculpture in ice or work in the cold. Both of the two Indian artists were expert stone carvers, cold weather novices. They had been to Colorado to a Marble Stone Carving Symposium in the town of Marble (where the stone for the Lincoln Memorial was quarried.) and so felt an affinity for us.
