TOPSHAM — Jay Bluck will serve you pretty much anything you’d like on ice.

The owner and operator of Sub-Zero Ice Carvings has made his works known near and far, from local events like weddings and festivals, to a carnival in Quebec, where he sculpted a 30-ton colossus.

Business has being strong enough that he relies on little marketing – just his website, Facebook and Instagram pages, and the occasional card; word of mouth has been key.

That good fortune has led Bluck to look to expand operations beyond the shed in his Topsham backyard.

Bluck began carving ice 10 years ago, while working as a banquet chef at a country club in the Portland area.

“I could already carve fruits and garnishes and make cool displays, and there was somebody there on staff who did ice carvings,” he said. “I just started with him, as an extra pair of hands.”

Bluck saw the money being made, and the fun being had.

“I was like, ‘wow. You’re not killing yourself 80 hours a week in some restaurant, slamming out food all day, and you get to go to these fun events?,” he recalled. “I could do this.'”

He was doing about four or five sculptures a year, “and they weren’t great; I was learning the tools,” he said in an interview inside his frigid shed Jan. 14.

Bluck progressed while working with a Falmouth sculptor for about a year and half. When his mentor moved to Connecticut, he said, he “just took over his turf by default, and I’ve been going at it ever since, and trying to expand into different markets, and different industries, and (aiming) to appeal to everybody.”

So far, so good.

“We’re working on a business plan, and we’re going to expand into a location somewhere, and try to get a bigger facility where we can start making our own ice,” he said. “We’re going to get into bagged ice, and ice sculptures. … We’ll be the only facility in Maine that’ll have the clear blocks.”

Buying four blocks of ice would once get him through the year. Bluck is now aiming for 125 sculptures this year. “And it just keeps growing every year; I take on more events,” he said.

Single block sculptures start at $250, and ice bars start at $600. Bluck’s live carving demonstrations start at $350.

Along with the work he does at home, Bluck does live ice-carving demonstrations at venues like summer music festivals and ATV rallies. Chainsaw wood carvings is another market he found he’d “grossly underestimated” – a hobby that has “taken off like gangbusters in the summertime, too.”

His carvings, online at subzeroicecarvings.com, include drink luges, ice bars, and logo and wedding pieces. Different drill bits allow him various levels of precision to produce different effects.

“Ice carvers adapted from wood carving,” Bluck said, showing off his wall of tools. “This is all contractor stuff: layout jigs, speed squares.”

The bulk of his ice sculpting work is naturally in the winter, although Bluck will still carve it in the warmer months. During the summer he will consolidate his ice into the smallest of his shed’s two freezers; it can fit 18 blocks standing up.

He will pull a block out to let it temper, work until melting starts, and then return the piece to the freezer and take a short break. If it’s a particularly hot day, Bluck will postpone his work until the cooler nighttime hours, using fans to blow the hot air out and pull the cooler air in.

He has traveled all over New England and as far as Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. At the “Carnaval of Quebec,” as part of Team USA in 2008, he created a 30-ton piece – the “scales of justice” tipped between man and nature – for the event’s international snow sculpting competition.

“It was like an Olympic event,” Bluck recalled. “… It took us about a week to do it.”

Ice bars are his favorite items to sculpt. Some objects, like polar bears, he can “free carve”; other more exact images for which he’s been contracted, like a logo on the L.L. Bean boot, require him to reference a template via in order to get the fine elements just right.

In cases like those, he wants the product to be as close to the real thing as possible, to garner the best reactions from passersby as they recognize this creation. Plus the client likes it, too.

“People are … walking by,” Bluck said, “and they can tell right away, (and say) ‘awesome job, man; that looks exactly like the boot!'”

His love for the work has maintained his interest the past decade. He gets to work from home, which is helpful when his kids aren’t at school.

And of course, it’s all about the events.

“I tell people all the time, as a chef I used to be on the other side of the wall at an event; out back getting the food ready, getting the plates ready, getting everybody where they need to be,” he said. “Now, I get to go to the same events, but … I get to experience the other side of the event, and I love it.”

Alex Lear can be reached at 780-9085 or alear@theforecaster.net. Follow him on Twitter: @learics.

Jay Bluck of Topsham has spent a decade carving all manner of objects out of ice, wood and other materials.Live carvings, such as this one at a Bowdoin College museum in Brunswick, are among the aspects of Jay Bluck’s business he enjoys the most.

Ice carver Jay Bluck, of Sub-Zero Ice Carvers of Topsham, puts the finishing touches on a fish sculpture at the 2015 Topsham Fair.

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