In early 2004, I got a phone call from Greg Butauski. He was looking for fourth carver for the four man team event in Fairbanks, Alaska (specifically the IceArt World Championships.) Greg and I had carved together successfully before, so I was pretty interested, but I was ready to drop everything and run to the airport when I found out that it was Junichi Nakamura’s team. Besides winning the Fairbanks event a number of times, Junichi was a two time Olympic gold medalist (Hamar, Norway and Nagano, Japan) Apparently, two other carvers had been unable to go, so Greg had been invited and had been asked to find another carver as well. It was a tremendous opportunity, and I quickly shifted my schedule around to free up the necessary time and booked my airline tickets.

    I didn’t know what to expect and I was uncertain as to what was expected of me. I solicited advice from other carvers that had competed with Junichi before so that I would have some idea as to how things would go. I had only briefly met Junichi on a couple of other occasions, once competing against him at Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada and then again when he won the NICA National Championships in Munster, Indiana (I took fourth, my highest finish so far at the championships.)

    As it turned out, I didn’t need to prepare that much before the competition. Junichi and his frequent teammate and translator Shinichi Sawamura had already done about everything that you could do. Because of their extensive experience at the Fairbanks event, they knew what we would need and had already gotten all of the equipment together.

    The first thing we did together was to look at the design. This isn’t as simple as you might think. We got together in a fortunately large room and we first looked at the drawing on a regular sheet of legal size paper. It looked to be a Sioux Indian on one knee with a long spear in his left hand and a massive eagle on his right arm, held above his head.  Even looking at the small drawing of the sculpture, the piece was intimidating and I wondered what I’d gotten by self into. It quickly got worse because then we got a look at the real design: the template. In order to get a sense of the size of the piece, we had to lay the paper template out on the floor. This meant we had to clear out several tables and a lot of chairs just to see how big it would be. If I recall correctly, it turned out to be 24 feet high. We had a lot of work to do.

    The actual carving went by quickly even though the days were long (at least 14 hours) and it was pretty cold most of the time. At first I had a lot of energy (Junichi cautioned me to slow down on the first day), but by the end of the competition, I was beat. Surprisingly, I was never sore, but I attribute that to the fact that there was little that we could actually lift or move ourselves. When it came time to lift something, we had to call over the heavy machinery. The guys that run the lifts really know what they’re doing; their ability to maneuver sometimes delicate, always awkward pieces of ice into place is very impressive.

    Much of the sculpture was carved on the ground and lifted into place. The eagle was carved almost entirely on the ground, and in fact, the slab of ice that almost got me, turned out to be part of the eagle’s left wing. With so much carving to be done, each teammember had to work on separate elements that would combined later. After we had done some initial work on the foundation of the sculpture, Greg went to work on the eagle and I went to work on parts of the Indian’s headdress and his knife. Because there were so many little parts to the headdress, this got to be rather tedious after a while. Fortunately, it was relatively warm at this point and I was able to pick a spot in the sun to work. Just when I was beginning to think that my major contribution to the sculpture would be small detail parts, however, Junichi indicated that the figure’s face and head needed some work and that I should move on to that. I regarded this as an honor and it demonstrated to me that Junichi has a very keen awareness of how to get a team to function together well. Apparently, he realized that I was a bit frustrated with the small parts that I’d worked on so far, so he assigned me part of the sculpture that indicated a lot of trust in what I was doing. It was a valuable lesson to me.

    After most of the sculpture was assembled, I did some work on the juncture between the Indian and the eagle, where the eagle sits on the Indian’s right arm.

    All in all, it was a fantastic experience and I’ll talk a little more about it another time.

“Ancestral Spirit” at the end of the competition. Junichi later made some subtle changes for the final photograph.

The following comment was on the original blog entry. After some technical difficulties, the blog had to be reconstructed, and this was the only way to keep the original comments.

Darren

does junichi have a website I am not aware of the best place I have found to view his work is www.icealska.com  or www.patrickendres.com I guess I need to break down and by his book

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 - 02:15 PM

Additional note: For more photos of Junichi’s sculptures, visit his gallery on this site