His art is fleeting and brief but brightens bleak Midwest winters

Michelangelo used wet plaster and fresco to paint the Sistine Chapel. Rodin worked in mostly bronze and marble to create his sculptures.

While both artists surely understood the impermanence of even the hardiest mediums, they knew at least that their work would outlive them and bestow upon them artistic immortality.

Scott Lesperance sculpts in a medium that contains its own certain and relatively immediate obsolescence. He’s okay with the short life span of his works.

“There’s not really (any heartache),” Lesperance says. “Sometimes I’m glad it’s run its course. It’s time to start on something fresh. Honestly, I have no emotional attachment to the sculptures.”

If you’ve driven down Glendale in North Appleton during the winter, east past Theda Care/AMC Hospital, you’ve seen his work: Snow cones; Stitch from Lilo and Stitch; a Wizard of Oz trio; Woody from Toy Story; Lady from Lady and the Tramp; and a host of animals, from sharks to dolphins to owls.

Lesperance is a snow sculptor and the works he has created with meticulous attention to detail and often in harsh conditions have offered a happy respite from the dull eternity of Appleton winters for 20 years now. If he professes a non-chalance about what he does, it may be because he is such a harsh critic of his own work, he has sometimes considered knocking them down in mid-creation if they fall short of his vision (he never has). 

Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t derive satisfaction from the work itself and from the pleasure he knows it gives to passersby.

“I think the general public probably feel (the works are) good enough for them,” Lesperance says. “You know, where I see I didn't quite get the nice smooth roundness I wanted. But I like to contribute something to the community.  And when I'm out there, people drive by and honk their horn or some may stop and express to me that they enjoy what I do every year.

“So there's a lot of satisfaction with that and it's good exercise. When I'm stomping on the snow, I mean, it gets your heart rate going pretty good.”

It all began with a shark

Like most Fox Cities residents Lesperance was not expecting the two early snows we received in late fall, so he wasn’t really prepared when the weather gods delivered unto him an abundance of his medium. He had ordered a figurine model online for work he was planning in January or February, when the heaviest snows tend to fall in northeast Wisconsin. But it had yet to arrive.

He ended up sculpting Stitch, using a figurine from the daughter of his wife’s cousin. By Saturday morning it was already bearing signs of erosion from the wind and he was out – in minus 29 wind chills – using his wooden chisel to redefine areas around the eyes and ears. He had just purchased a pair of heated gloves but it was no match for that particular morning.

Still, he’s hesitant to begrudge a little discomfort. Cold is his friend, sun and warmth his enemies.

Lesperance created his first snow sculpture – a shark – two decades ago when he first moved into his house at the corner of Racine and Glendale. A Menasha native, he lost his job in 2009 during the financial crisis and went to work for Twin City Monument Works in Neenah creating artwork on headstones before moving on to Appleton Marble and Granite in 2014.

“It was kind of a blessing when I lost my job because I really love what I’m doing now,” says Lesperance. “I love art and now I get to create art and get paid for it.”

In 2020, the Discovery Channel came to Appleton as part of their Small Town Throw Down series and asked Lesperance and a fellow snow sculptor to create a work that represented the city. The show was focused on debunking reputations small towns had gained over the years. For Appleton, that reputation was “drunkest city in America.”

Lesperance and his partner instead created in one work a tableaux of the city and its most notable – and positive – features. Those included the Hearthstone, Lawrence University and the Lawrence Chapel, the Zuelke Building, the Skyline Bridge, Corey Chisel and the Mile of Music, Houdini Plaza and Houdini himself.

A laborious process

Lesperance works with three or four basic tools to create his figures: a hand saw for cutting and shaping; a flat serrated-edged piece that looks sort of like a sander for smoothing and rounding; and a wood rasp for etching and definition.

It all starts with a three-dimensional figurine or model.

“I do quite a bit of math to scale it,” he says. “And then I do a rough drawing and I put all the measurements down. And then I put marks into the snow, I might jab a little knife or something as a starting point.  And I'm not really efficient. It takes time. It can be stressful at times. There have been times I just wanted to push the thing over and go in and forget the whole thing.”

The grunt work before the actual art begins involves hinging the four sides of a rectangular wooden form he’s made – about two feet by two feet across and four-and-a-half feet high – setting it on its end and filling it full of snow. Once it gets nearly to the top, he climbs in and begins stomping on it, adding more snow, and stomping some more until it’s packed in tightly. He then places straps around the form and tightens all four walls to pack it in even more thoroughly. 

Lesperance will often create two of these dense blocks side by side, one for the finished product, the other from which to create parts – arms, for instance – that need affixing to the work. He tries for obvious reasons to avoid long tentacled appendages. He cuts holes into the main work to insert pieces from the second block.

He says he works on average eight hours on one figure. Depending on the depth of the snow it might take longer. If it’s sparse he’ll have to travel all over the yard to collect enough to fill and pack his form. With the back-to-back six-inch snowfalls earlier this month, all the snow he needed was easily collected.

Keeping his work friendly and fun

While Stitch begins to fade – even as Lesperance prolongs his life with his defining tools – Lesperance sets to work on a new sculpture a couple feet away. This one is what he describes as an “elf-slash-baby-Grinch.” With warmer weather and rain in the forecast, Lesperance doesn’t have high hopes for its longevity.

“They will noticeably lose definition from the wind,” he says. “They do evaporate even though it's cold. It starts to smooth and then you can't really see (the details). Then at some point I'll probably just push it over. Move it out of the way and then start a new one.”

Lesperance’s wife runs the Facebook page  for his work, which has over a thousand followers and generates a lot of engagement.  

Among his favorite creations is a snow cone, which he rendered twice over the years. His most elaborate work is probably his Wizard of Oz trio of Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Wicked Witch from 2021. 

Though he admits he’s eyeing possibly doing some more grown-up content, he says he will avoid politics or anything provocative.

“I try to keep it family friendly,” he says with a laugh. “I don't want to make any statements. I feared if I made it political, somebody would probably smash it if they didn't like my political position. So I try to make something that would appeal to a wide range of people. I tend to do a lot of Disney characters, I think people find them to be fun. A lot of people can identify if they have kids.”

His art is fleeting and brief but brightens bleak Midwest winters © 2025 by Kelly Fenton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0