By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 17, 2007
WINNIPEG, Manitoba Miguel Joyal is thinking Styrofoam.
It is almost the end of a long, brutally cold day, the latest in a frozen march of them for Joyal. Under many layers of clothing and behind a mustache walrused with icicles, Joyal is contemplating -- well, he is contemplating a bison's nose, a gigantic one, close up.
But he really is thinking of how much better it would be to be sculpting in Styrofoam than standing on a street corner in Winnipeg carving a statue in snow when the temperature is 10 degrees below zero.
"I did a Styrofoam polar bear, life-size. And people think it's snow," Joyal says, pausing to appraise his latest strokes. He's turned his attention to the bison's mane now.
"So I could do it all summer and all spring, and it doesn't matter, it won't melt," he muses. "Then the first little snowfall -- bang, it's up. People will say, 'Boy, does he work fast, this guy.' "
Of course, that would not be quite in the spirit of snow sculpting, which is a good industry for artists such as Joyal in Winnipeg during the annual winter Festival du Voyageur, which ends Sunday.
But one could be humbuggy about spirit when the wind chill reaches 30 below.
Joyal, 48, is doing seven snow statues this year for the festival, an annual celebration of the French Canadians who transported furs thousands of miles by canoe and backpack.
By the time the festival is finished, he will have worked pretty much five weeks straight, every day. In the cold. Global warming be damned, this has been a cold winter on the prairies. One of the coldest he remembers, and Joyal has been carving snow sculptures for the festival for 22 years.
He's a professional artist, with an accomplished repertoire. His bronze Louis Riel, the father of Manitoba, stands behind the legislative building. He's done wood chieftains and Madonnas, stone figurine rear ends and eagle heads, and glorious snow pieces ranging from gigantic bears to an almost life-size airplane greeting visitors at the airport.
His works are commissioned. "I don't do this for nothing. You think I'm crazy?"
How much is he paid? "Not enough," he says. "I wish I got paid like a lawyer."
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.
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