It’s a Cold Life, but His Work Couldn’t Tolerate Any Heat
You can’t imagine the bleak, cold solitude until you work inside an ice-storage house.
“But that’s the way I want it,” said Mark Daukas, who was working in 30-degree temperature while sculpting a rearing, winged horse from a block of ice.
Bare light bulbs, the sound of electric power tools and a blaring radio accented the eerie, mist-filled setting.
“I do it by myself in the ice box. It keeps my technique a secret,” said Daukas, 30, of Newport Beach, who had just won the 1987 National Ice Carving Championship, garnering $1,500 and a trip to Japan.
Daukas has been ice sculpting for 12 years, “so I’m in the advanced stage and I do advanced work.” He has also won every contest he has entered the past three years.
He considers himself “a sculptor,” but he understands that his artwork is history within hours. “I’ve gotten used to it melting away, although the melting evokes a lot of emotion from people who watch it fade away.”
The melting might upset him, he said, if he didn’t preserve his work by photographing and cataloguing each finished piece. In fact, he is planning on publishing a book with pictures of his work and descriptions of his sculpting process.
Part of the winning process, he feels, is keeping warm. “I just have to wear a lot of clothing,” he said, although he had stripped off his jacket and was wearing a sweater to give him more upper-arm freedom. Usually he dons ski wear and heavy boots.
Daukas, a self-taught ice sculptor who studied acting at Orange Coast College, feels his artistic bent accounts for his financial and artist success as a full-time ice sculptor. Most of his work is done for elegant hotel parties. Some is for weddings.
His lowest price for a sculpture is about $250, he revealed, adding, “I live in a $1,500-a-month apartment, so I’m doing OK.”
An acknowledged leader and innovator with such processes as ice lamination, “I like to take chances on design and sculpture,” he said. “I feel I’m a pioneer in this field, which really hasn’t been developed.”
The lamination process encompasses a number of blocks of ice that are put together in the final process.
He has suffered with his reckless approach. “I once did a life-sized discus thrower that fell over and broke,” he said. “That was two day’s work in the ice box. I sometimes dream about dropping and breaking them. Those are terrible dreams.”
Besides his sculpture reproductions of an Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty, “I like to do life-size animals and humans as accurately as possible,” he said.
His latest efforts during ice-sculpting contests are in fantasy art and design, which includes muscular men and voluptuous women. “They are really fantastic,” he said.
If you like a little mayhem with your gift giving, the Marines, true to their tough tradition, are going to provide some this year for their Toys for Tots program.
Staff Sgt. Lou Gacs said unwrapped gifts worth about $5 will admit donors to a heavy-hitting Martial Arts Tournament at 10 a.m. Dec. 6 in the gymnasium at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro.
Every week Pastor Kenneth Hartzheim places a 10-second sermon of sorts on his message board in front of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Fullerton.
For instance, on Father’s Day, the sign read, “The best gift a father can give his children is to love their mother.”
Another was: “There will always be prayer in public schools as long as there are final exams.”
Surprisingly, Hartzheim said, humor isn’t the best attraction on his message-board ministry.
“I think there’s a longing in people for something deep,” he said, “things that seem to strike home . . . (such as) ‘Life is fragile. Handle it with prayer.’ ”
“We’re not trying to attract people into the church, Hartzheim said. “We’re just putting out messages to make people think about themselves.”
But occasionally, you’ll see a quick hitter on his message board, such as, “The trouble with this country is too much apathy . . . but who cares!”
Acknowledgments--Carolyn Bergt, 32, of Santa Ana, a third-grade teacher at St. John’s Lutheran School in Orange, was named Teacher of the Year of the Southern California District, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which includes Arizona. She was selected from among 2,000 teachers.
