A Madelinot and his passion for ice sculpture

For the past fifteen years, Madelinot artist Guy-Olivier Deveau has put his creativity to use in the ice sculptures that have made the reputation of the Carnaval de Québec and the Hôtel de Glace de Valcartier.

At Carnival 2022, his ice and snow sculptures are among the hundred pieces that can be admired by the public at the various event sites. It must be said that his work began well before the opening of the Carnival, to decorate, among other things, the Palais de Bonhomme. “I have been working seven days a week, 10-12 hours a day for two months, he told us a few weeks before the start of the festivities. For the Hôtel de Glace, open since January 2, we started as soon as it was cold enough, at the beginning of December.

The sculptor from Bassin was introduced to sculpture with Artisans du Sable, the founding company of the Magdalen Islands Sandcastle Competition, as part of a summer job when he was 18. -19 years old. He says he was first hired to organize castle-building workshops for visitors, along with local artists. “I learned all their tricks!” he said.

Then, when he was a philosophy student at Laval University, Mr. Deveau had the opportunity to rub shoulders with the professional sculptors of the International Sand Sculpture Festival in the Old Capital. Guy-Oliver Deveau had been hired there to shovel the sand and prepare the formwork for the demonstration pieces. “It was when I also started to make small windows in castles, to make small details, that my talent was noticed,” he confides.

It was through contact with Michel Lepire, founder of Sculptures Michel Lepire, and his son Marc, now the official sculptor of the Carnaval de Québec, that the Madelinot learned to sculpt ice and snow. “I learned a lot with them; it has become a real passion!”

Guy-Olivier Deveau, who then gave up his master’s studies in philosophy to become a professional sculptor and even cabinetmaker in his spare time, explains that there is a whole world between sand and ice. “With the sand, we work with our hands and small tools, such as a spatula and a trowel, to find more details. For ice, we use chainsaws and electric rotary tools, for example.”

However, although he admits to having a preference for sand because he is “more comfortable on a beach than at minus 35 ̊ C”, the sculptor from the Islands assures us that the large tools he wields to sculpting the ice allow him to work with good mittens, to avoid freezing his fingers. “Besides, the little details don’t age well on the ice, because they evaporate under the effect of the wind and the air,” he says. It’s easier to carve big life-size sculptures, with big details; with three to five blocks of ice topped on top of each other, you start to have something interesting.»