During the winter months, Maritimers have been hitting the snow and spending hours creating intricate, otherworldly patterns that are sometimes gone in a blink of an eye.
“I love the geometry and the amazing things with those mysterious crop circles that we see around the world,” said John Panopoulos.
Panopoulos and his wife, Charmaigne Letourneau, moved to Cap-Pelé from Ontario. Panopoulos wanted a new environment for sculpting and Letourneau was originally from Campbellton.
In February, Panopoulos glanced outside his window and was struck by how much the snow-covered lakefront by their house looked like a canvas.
“I thought, let’s embrace this opportunity with this lake, with snow, and let’s do something out there,” said Panopoulos.
“And so I thought of pulling those two elements of crop circles and I pulled out my compass sets and I started drawing out on paper.”
Panopoulos and Letourneau, who did snow shoe art for the first time, said it was a great form of exercise. (Submitted by Charmaigne Letourneau)
The design was 30 metres in diameter and took the couple around two hours to complete.
Panopoulos said there needs to be a starting point. “We have a rope … [and] one person stands in the middle and the other person walks around.”
Letourneau is an accountant and so the two came at the project with different styles.
“Being an accountant, one plus one equals two, and it’s pretty much, like, go with the flow. And for me to let go and follow along … I’m, like, ‘No, no, we’re going to do it perfect,'” said Letourneau while laughing.
The couple, who did snowshoe art for the first time, said it was a great form of cardio and posed a challenge to people to try their hand at it.
Seasoned veterans
In Riverview, snowshoe art has also made its mark after the town invited two Nova Scotia artists to complete a design for the Riverview Winter Carnival.
Truro’s Matt Robinson and Debert’s Sheldon Benoit spent almost four hours crafting a 30-metre design.
But this isn’t their first time at the snowshoe art rodeo. They have done designs like this about five times before, but this one posed a different challenge.
WATCH | Snowshoe art in action:
Two Nova Scotia artists stomp out stunning snow art in Riverview, N.B
3 hours ago
Duration 1:02
Matt Robinson and Sheldon Benoit spent almost four hours crafting a 30-metre design for the town of Riverview’s Winter Carnival. 1:02
“What we did not expect was there to be a 56-centimetre snowfall a day or so before and that caused some issues where the weight of the snow pushed down the ice,” said Robinson. “This caused water to seep above the ice, even though we had 16 inches of ice.”
The plan was to do the design with their snow boots for a crisper image.
Matt Robinson holds up a sketch the pair had done before starting their snow art piece for the town of Riverview. (Mrinali Anchan/Zoom)
But upon seeing the slush they were faced with, Benoit came up with the idea to switch to snowshoes.
“It takes a fair bit of patience because you can’t really undo a mistake, so you have to be pretty precise,” said Benoit.
“So it’s a lot of stopping, a lot of pre-planning so you get it done right.”
As a child, Robinson was always fascinated with geometric art.
“There’s a doodle that I used to do as a kid where it’s a checkerboard, but rather than straight lines, it’s squiggly lines and I would make that in Microsoft Paint and I would fill it in black and white.” said Robinson.
He added that, just for the fun of it, he attempted to stamp out that design, which ended up being 50 metres.
“I posted that on my Facebook and that took off ridiculously.”
Gone before you know it
Snow art is often fleeting.
“One day they could be there and we had a little bit of wind overnight and it could be very Etch-A-Sketch,” said Robinson who noted that was part of the charm.
“The very low impact, where they’re not taking up a lot…. They’re not doing much harm to the environment. That’s the beauty of it.”
The day after they had created their design, Panopoulos and Letourneau discovered that a snowmobile had gone through it.
“It’s a process and not a matter of how long it lasts,” said Panopoulos.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
