Sculpting Winter Into a Gallery of Giants

But his price "is going to double pretty soon," he says. "I decided I'm getting too old for this."

Today, "this" means a giant Cindy Klassen skating through a herd of giant bison. Klassen, the native Winnipeg speed skater who won five medals in the 2006 Winter Olympics, adorns the 15-foot-high sculpture because she is sponsored by Manitoba Telecom Services. The bison are there because they are part of the company's logo. And Joyal is carving them all because MTS paid for the sculpture.

He would do this piece in about a week, starting from a huge block of snow delivered by a front-end loader.

"I spent two days on the head," he says. "It's a portrait of someone, and I had to get it right. I set up a scaffold, and got comfortable, and did my thing.

"I had two, three pictures of her. I look at them back and forth, back and forth. You've got to determine the profile of the face. Once you have the profile, you can start taking off the sides. Placing the glasses was another tricky thing. There's a lot of thinking going on to line everything up."

Klassen's bigger-than-life head, complete with goggles, leads like the prow of a ship from the streamlined sculpture. He doesn't know whether she's been in town to see it.

Joyal works with long, metal gouges he has fashioned to replicate his woodworking tools. They slice cleanly through the hard-packed snow. He smooths corners with a grated paddle, the scrape-scrape sounds of his work competing with the traffic noises around him.

The sculpture sits in a center island of one of the busiest intersections in the city. He insisted on the spot because of its prominence.

"This is my art gallery. When I'm in my studio, I'm all alone," he says. "Here, people drive by and shout out, 'Great!' They talk. One guy came and offered me a brandy. I said, 'After the day is done.' I don't want to be up on ladders after having a brandy."

Joyal wears the warmest arctic boots he could buy, thick hide mittens and layers of high-tech coverings. He listens to rock-and-roll through earphones. He says he usually does not get cold because the work is hard.

"My arms and fingers start to go numb at night. Not because of the cold, but because of the whacking boom, boom, boom with the tools," he says. "You do that all day, it's like a jackhammer. Do that for two, three weeks, it catches up.

"My shoulders feel like they are hanging down to my waist" by day's end, he says. "That's why I get paid for it. The hard work and the knowledge of sculpting. And the weather."

It is 5 p.m. and getting dark. Joyal has been working today since 10 a.m. He is ready to quit, ready to go home. There, he says, he will have a nice hot shower. Followed by a cold beer.

And he will dream about Styrofoam.