What it’s like to be an ice sculptor

David Van Camp makes the sidewalks sparkle during the Loop Ice Carnival.

• I studied hotel and restaurant management in college. We messed around with ice carvings—we’d get a block of ice and spend hours on it.
• I started getting into ice carving competitions. I traveled to places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Alaska, and Japan. I’d meet a lot of other people, and we’d share styles and tools. Then I started my business, Ice Visions, in 1992, while I was a chef.
• I’m not too proud of my first carvings. The tools were like caveman tools. We didn’t approach it the way we do now. Now we have cool templates and high-tech tools. It’s kind of created a monster.
• We’re busy all the time. I’d say we carve just under 2,000 sculptures per year. Some weeks, we do 40 sculptures.
• Getting all the different sculptures to different places at different times is the toughest part. We have six to deliver this Saturday [in early November] at 5:15 p.m.
• For the Halloween block party [in the CWE], Sub Zero wanted a 20-foot-long luge to pour booze from. I thought that was dangerous, so we compromised and stacked 20-by-20-by-9-inch blocks that got smaller the higher they went. We went 12 feet tall.
• I’ve been involved with the Loop Ice Carnival for 12 years. I started out with just a couple of carvings and a tiny slide for kids. [Ice Visions now carves about 100 ice blocks for the event.]
• I’ve been to Japan three times for the world competition. A typical ice block is 300 pounds and is 20 by 40 by 10 inches. At that competition, they give you 20 of those ice blocks, and you can stack them any way you want. It’s pretty amazing. The Japanese basically invented ice sculpting.
• While training ice carvers, I used to joke that the image is already in there—you just have to take away the stuff that shouldn’t be.
• Sometimes when I look at a picture of one of our sculptures, I get overwhelmed. These were all blocks of ice that were exactly the same size. It’s endless what can be carved.

The Loop Ice Carnival comes to University City January 13–14. For more about Ice Visions, go to icevisions.com.