Tag Archives: ice

Covered in Ice

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

The trees that still had their leaves, mostly oaks, were the ones to suffer the most. (click to enlarge)

The trees that still had their leaves, mostly oaks, were the ones to suffer the most.
(click to enlarge)

I read on facebook where somebody here in Dallas wrote, under a nice bright picture of downtown, “I remember when it was sunny and eighty degrees… wait, that was yesterday.”

The freezing rain blew in overnight, coating everything in a transparent crystalline shell. I bundled up, breathed the bitter clean air, and carefully walked around the familiar landscape of my yard – transformed into an alien arctic spectacle. When the breeze would blow the world would tinkle with tiny crackling ice. The sun was behind thin clouds but enough light shone through to light up the glassy ice crystals like myriad clear jewels strung everywhere.

We have a huge oak tree in our front yard. Overnight, I could hear wood splitting as the tons of frozen water dripping down the still-attached leaves weighted the wood past its breaking point. In the morning, the yard was littered with limbs, with more broken ones suspended overhead, still stuck in the thick canopy. I’ll have to wait a day or so and then cut the fallen limbs up for firewood and haul the rest to the curb for the city to pick up.

A guy was wandering the neighborhood looking for work – he offered to clear the fall for twenty bucks, which is a more than fair price. I said no… and I’m not sure why, but I think I want to do it myself.

SCABhenge

Posted on by Bill Chance
Closeup of the crazing in the ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

Closeup of the crazing in the ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

The ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

The ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

The last moments of the ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

The last moments of the ice sculpture at the Dallas Contemporary

I have always been fascinated by ice as a sculptural medium. It is cheap, versatile, and, most importantly, temporary. It is fixed in time. What you see now is totally unique, it will never be repeated.

The coolest ice sculptures were Dane Pennington’s Transcendence – from the Arts District a couple years ago. Larger than life figures and monoliths slowly melted – releasing stones that were imprisoned within. I kept going downtown day after day to watch them melt.

Transcendence, on the first night.

Transcendence, on the first night.

Transcendence, on the first night.

Transcendence, on the first night.

After a day of melting in the rain

After a day of melting in the rain

A few weeks ago, I went on (and wrote about) a fun bike ride organized by Dallas Cycle Style. It started at, and was part of, The Dallas Contemporary 35th anniversary celebration. Out in front of the Contemporary was an ice sculpture called SCABhenge, built by the Socialized Contemporary Artists Bureau.

It had been out all night and the ice had crazed and was falling apart. I was there for its final demise, melting in the Texas afternoon.

If you watch this time lapse video closely, you can see a few bicycles from our group go by.

Ice and Kale

Posted on by Bill Chance

One of the popular plants for winter garden color here in Texas is Ornamental Kale.  You see beds of purple, green and red cabbage all over the place.

 

Ornamental Kale at the Dallas Arboretum

Ornamental Kale at the Dallas Arboretum

 

Yes, it does get cold here sometimes.

Not right now, though. I took this photo back in late December sometime… not sure exactly when. While a large part of the country is digging out from under massive winter storms, it’s warm and beautiful in North Texas. It was about seventy today, sunny and calm. I was able to go on a long bike ride, the parks were packed with folks, the perfect outdoor day.

Of course, we pay for that in the summer. July and August are toxic. So let me enjoy the good times when I can.

Ice and Glass

Posted on by Bill Chance

We had an unusual White Christmas here in Dallas yesterday. Inspired by a friend of mine and her wonderful photography, I decided to brave the sub-freezing temperatures and go down to the Arboretum one last time for the year today. The Chihuly exhibit that I visited a while back is leaving at the end of the year. I have taken (and posted) a lot of photos of the glass sculptures over the year and wanted to get in my last shot. As I looked out my door and saw my neighborhood still blanketed in a sheet of white I imagined how gorgeous the colorful glass would be in a frosty setting. I packed up my camera and a couple lenses and drove down there.

Unfortunately, it had not snowed in that part of town very much and the Arboretum was mostly free of the white stuff. Still, due to the cold it was almost empty (bunch of wimps) and the many leafless trees added a unique, open aspect to the landscape. I enjoyed walking around and filled another digital card up with even more photographs to wile away the web space over the next months.

I’ll miss the colorful Chihuly glass when it leaves in a couple of days, but I’m already looking forward to my next visit and the other natural beauties of the place.

Walking around, especially perusing the shadows a bit, I discovered there was a little ice here and there, after all.

ice7

ice6

ice5

ice4

ice2

Chihuly – ice in the creek

Posted on by Bill Chance

More photographs from my writing group’s trip to see Dale Chihuly’s work in the Dallas Arboretum.

One of the many cool things about the installation is that you never knew when you would turn a corner and run into something unexpected. The artist placed large turquoise colored irregular blocks of glass in a rock creek that ran through the gardens. Water ran past the glass and tumbled down the artificial watercourse towards the lake. The glass looked like huge blocks of translucent ice – unexpected and beautiful.

The most powerful and ethereal beauty is that which is a surprise.

A Week and a Day

Posted on by Bill Chance

Saturday – It’s been eight days since I saw the art installation Transcendence downtown. The ice sculptures have been melting all this time.

First Night

Next Day

The Day After That

A couple days after that

I had to see what has happened in the meantime. Would the ice be completely melted? Would the installation still be there?

I drove down and parked down the street. It was still there, the gravel was still raked, and there was a lot of ice left in the two big blocks. The taller block had fallen over and broken in two, but the large horizontal block was not noticeably smaller.

The two human forms were nothing other than small irregular pieces of ice. The stone from one of them was missing. I remembered the story the woman from the Dallas Center for Architecture had told me.

She said that she had heard that one of the stones in the human forms was from the parents of a childhood friend of the artist. This friend had passed away and after the ice is melted and the artwork is closed the stone will be given back to the parents to be placed in their stone garden on their rural home as a memorial. A nice story.

Maybe that one stone is now in a garden on the Oklahoma border. I’d like to think so.

While I was taking pictures I could hear a lot of noise – a metal grinding sound with a series of loud clacks – coming from behind a wall surrounding an unfinished building next door. I realized that some kids were skateboarding over there. After a few minutes a couple boards came flying over the wall and then their owners scampered through a gap in a fence after.

“What is this?” they asked, “Is that ice?”

I explained that it was an art work, that there had been large sculptures of ice that have been melting for a week. They had never heard of a Zen rock garden, so I explained as best as I could. They seemed to think it was cool.

“I’m glad we didn’t walk around in there,” one of them said.

So am I.

The two human form sculptures, what is left of them

A reminder of what one of these looked like at the unveiling

The large upright block fell over - you can see the light-colored gravel it rested on.

What it looked like at the unveiling

A group of women walked by after leaving the Opera House.

Ice Melts in the Sun

Posted on by Bill Chance

It was cold today… especially cold for Dallas. Barely above freezing with a whipping north wind. I thought about staying in, but I wondered how Transcendence was doing, how the ice sculptures were holding up. I didn’t go see them yesterday and there were a couple other things I wanted to do downtown (like eat some Kimchee Fries from the food trucks in the Arts District) so I went to catch a DART train.

As always, the southbound train was leaving as I climbed the stairs to the platform. It would be twenty minutes before another southbound came along, the platform at the station I had chosen was elevated and the wind was biting and miserable.

So I grabbed a Northbound Train. It was more comfortable sitting in a heated car than knocking about the wind-swept concrete platform. I looked at the schedule, examined the time between stops, did a little hard calculation and was able to exit only two minutes before the next southbound came along.

Back at Transcendence…

Unveiling

First Day

Second Day

I found that the first rock had fallen. The more upright figure had given up his whole torso and his stone had dropped to the gravel alongside what was left of his legs. The other human still had his rocky heart inside his torso – but barely. He had melted through to the stone on both sides and there was a visible gap at the top. It would only be a matter of time before his fell.

The rectangular blocks were holding up better. They were full of faults and cracks now, their once crystal clear complexion now a white tracing of opalescent pearl – beautifully glowing when the sun peeked out. The rock inside the largest block was almost invisible now.

There was a professional photographer down there with a big expensive camera. He had been coming down every day. We talked about how long the big block would last.

“It depends on the temperature,” he said.

“Of course, but that big block might last another week – if it stays this cold.”

“Ah, but the ice melts in the sun, no matter how cold it is.”

Every time the sun would emerge from the clouds he would yell at me, “See! See!” and wave his arms.

He’s right… but I still think that big block will be here for a bit.

Ice Melts in the Rain

Posted on by Bill Chance

Help me, I'm melting!

It was a cold (well, cold for Dallas) wet and miserably gray day. Storms all night and rolling bands of rain driven down from a dark sky all day. A perfect fall day to huddle inside… maybe read a little, eat the last of the leftovers, maybe watch some football on TV, maybe do nothing at all. And that’s what I did.

But there was one burr under my blanket. I wanted to see what the ice sculptures were doing in downtown Dallas. I had seen Transendence at its unveiling, one day later, and now… what was it up to? It had been raining constantly and I knew that fresh water from the sky would melt the ice quickly, so I had no choice but to head out and drive down there.

The roads were wet, the visibility was poor, and, of course, everybody else was driving like bats out of hell – so the drive was stressful enough. I pulled up and parked illegally right next to the installation (there was nobody, and I mean nobody around). Luckily, there was a bit of a break in the weather – only a cold spitting windy miserable drizzle.

The first thing I noticed was that they had put out some hand-lettered signs all around the place that said, “Keep Off Gravel (Art Exhibit).” No shit, Sherlock. If those had been out there that first night, would all the drunken idiots have trampled all over the place? Whatever. For the first time, there were no tracks at all across the raked gravel. Never underestimate the power of a hand-lettered sign. The Sharpie reigns supreme.

The human figures were melted into unrecognizable shapes. Their heads were gone, arms mere suggestions, their stone hearts seemed poised to plunge from their bodies to the gravel below.

I know that is what they are supposed to do, it is their purpose – but it is still a little sad to see the beautiful things come to such an end.

The rectangular blocks, on the other hand, are fairing a lot better. They have shrunk a little, one is tipping a bit, but are still intact. They may last quite a long time.

The flesh is feeble, weak, and transient, while the crystalline inanimate geometric mass resists the heat, the water, the slings and arrows and survives until the bitter end. It is the way of all things.

Here are three pictures of the second human figure on each of the three days. If I had thought about it, I would have carefully taken pictures from identical spots, using identical lenses, on each day… but I’m an idiot. Sorry, that would have been cool.

At the unveiling

One day later.

After a day of melting in the rain

Piedras en el Hielo

Posted on by Bill Chance

I was terribly tired after work – futzed and dutzed around too much and was late getting to the Arts District downtown. Luckily, I caught a train quickly and made it only a few minutes after the unveiling. I would have liked to see it opened up, displayed, unveiled… whatever… but still, walking up on it in the dark, seeing the crowd, the bright lights reflecting off the ice was excellent enough.

In a little gritty disused space on the corner of a parking garage across the street from the Wyly Theater a local artist, Shane Pennington, had hauled in some gravel and raked out a temporary Zen Garden. The beautiful kicker is that the stones were embedded in giant sculptures made of ice. The idea was that as the ice melted, the stones would drop into their proper place in the garden. The work was called Transcendence.

The crowd was awed and impressed. At first, there were a lot of men in suits (apparently sponsors) and serious looking folks wearing ID tags. It was hard to take photographs – it was dark overall and the light glancing off and refracting through the ice looked fantastic – but didn’t surrender to a static recording. Still most folks hauled out their phones and snapped something. There were some professional photographers out with heavy tripods and huge lenses. Most folks walked around and around, but a few clots of people developed along a concrete wall, simply standing there and staring.

There was a big Christmas celebration going on, so it didn’t take long for families to start drifting over. The kids, of course, were mesmerized. Their parents would try to speak to them about what they were seeing, but the kids ignored their words. I heard one mother extolling her toddler to look at the, “piedras en el hielo.”

I left the sculpture and wandered the area for a few hours – ate at a food truck, heard some jazz, and stumbled across a unique and wonderful troop of Aztec dancers rehearsing down by the Cathedral Guadalupe. It wasn’t really very late, but I felt like heading home so I decided to stop by the ice sculptures one last time before I hiked to the train station.

How long does it take ice to melt? Big blocks like this take a long time. I remember when I was a kid there was a stupid game show and part of one episode was the contestants were given a huge block of ice, matches, towels, and such – they were going to get paid by how much ice they could melt in a half-hour, plus they made bets on how much would melt. It was shocking how little ice melted – only a couple of pounds. Large hunks like those sculptures might last days.

I loved watching the water drip off the noses of the two human forms, but drops won’t get it done very fast.

But I was horrified when I reached Transcendence. Earlier, everyone had moved around the installation in an orderly fashion, respecting the waves of raked gravel that made up the Zen Garden. Now, however, there was a different group there. They were younger, louder, and drunk. Most had plastic cups of wine teetering in their hands, hauled up to their giggling faces, while they trod willy nilly all over the place.

They were walking all over the gravel – the carefully sculpted shapes long trod into nothing. They were posing with the sculptures, licking the people, pretending to hug them, or worse. I saw one guy kicking at the blocks.

It was disgusting. They had no idea what the artwork was about. Unless I’m wrong – maybe the artwork was about how people would fail to respect the garden, in retrospect, it was to be expected. To these upper-class-twits the sculpture was about their own crass amusement.

I couldn’t stand the scene, so I walked away as quickly as I could.