After a heavy snowfall, a Michigan art teacher made the most of freshly-shoveled snow piles in her front yard to create dramatic sculptures. Her 3-dimensional, almost-lifesized “snow sharks” not only turned heads in the neighborhood, but they also quickly went viral.
Jennifer Ramirez, 52, of Madison Heights, Michigan, has been a high school art teacher for over 27 years. She has made snow sculptures since her teens but has upped the ante in the last ten years, making Pokemon and Angry Birds sculptures for her kids and gradually branching into more realistic sculptures.
“The shark idea was suggested by my friend, Brygida. I loved the idea so I ran with it,” Ramirez told The Epoch Times. “I started the snow sharks on a Wednesday and finished them on a Saturday.”
Ramirez admits that she was just trying to make the “neighborhood smile” through her effort.
“Never in a million years would I have predicted that they would have gone viral,” she said.
Ramirez’s neighborhood was hit with heavy snow on Jan. 25. She first shoveled snow off her driveway into a large pile. The next day she divided the pile into two smaller ones and started building her sharks using reference pictures from one of her favorite shows, the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week.”
“There are three sharks,” she said. “One is breaching out of the snow, another has his head slightly out of the snow, and the third is just a fin sticking out of the snow ... that was an aesthetic choice; the lawn needed a compositional balance.”
Ramirez, who “loves the snow and cold,” worked alone, for an hour or two every day for three days on the sculptures. The last days were dedicated to fine-tuning her sharks, adding teeth made from snow and ice, and subtle color using food dye mixed with water in a spray bottle.
According to her, the biggest technical problem she’s had to deal with when working on snow sculptures has been the weather.
She said: “If it gets too warm, or the sun shines too much on the snow, they melt. I did have to ’repair' the sharks daily, to combat the melting. Sometimes the snow is too dry for packing, and when that is the case I take a spray bottle of water to moisten the snow.”
The art teacher, who has a side business painting murals, started creating community art during the COVID lockdown to amuse her neighbors.
“I have a privacy fence that runs along the street, and I started doing chalk drawings on it. The community loved the drawings so I continued. When I couldn’t create them in the winter, I switched to creating snow sculptures,” she told The Epoch Times. “I hope the sculptures inspire more people to make fun art!”
