Havertown resident Don Lowing works magic with a chainsaw and chisel, turning blocks of ice into frozen pieces of art, writes Maria Panaritis for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lowing, 43, has performed his craft before students at local schools and at Linvilla Orchards in Media, sculpting characters such as Olaf and Elsa from the Disney film Frozen, or Dr. Suess’s the Grinch.

After earning a culinary degree from Bucks County Community College in the early 1990s, Lowing studied animation, film, design, and sculpture at the University of the Arts. Ice-carving was a niche art done mostly by chefs when he took a stab at his first frozen slab in the 1990s. He loved it so much he ended up doing it full time for about a decade.

Advertisement

Lowing stopped ice-sculpting full time because of how hard it can be on an artist’s body. At Linvilla, he hauled huge blocks of ice all by himself when he wasn’t standing on a forklift and pressing his body against enormous slabs to keep them from slipping off.

The trained chef also earned himself an executive MBA. Today, he works full time at Saint Joseph’s University helping professors design computer illustrations. In his free time, he goes back to sculpting ice figures.

Read more about Don Lowing in the Philadelphia Inquirer by clicking here.