Colin Moynihan Before the snow began melting during the weekend, Adam Johnson used letters made of snow to create poetry on the barks of trees in Tompkins Square Park. Below: Mr. Johnson at work.

In the days since a powerful blizzard blanketed the neighborhood East Village residents have built snowmen, snow forts, igloos and even a few abstract-looking sculptures out of snow. The drifts are now vanishing quickly, but on Friday afternoon, when many surfaces were still covered by a thick blanket of white, Adam Johnson, a 26-year-old furniture designer and painter, decided to introduce in Tompkins Square Park what could be a brand new genre of expression: snow poetry.

Initially Mr. Johnson was drawn to the park because he hoped to build a snowman that would compete with a large specimen near the center of Tompkins Square. A different inspiration struck, however, when he observed that a hurled snowball left a white mark on the bark of a tree.

“I wanted to top that guy in the other part of the park,” he said as he worked on his creations near the East Ninth Street entrance from Avenue A. “But I couldn’t do that so I had to find a new route to snow-making fame.”

For more than an hour on Friday afternoon, Mr. Johnson, carefully wrote messages on the trunks of trees in Tompkins Square. The technique he employed was methodical and involved picking up bits of snow that had just the right gooey consistency then shaping that raw material into letters that could be read from yards away.

The first snow poem he created read simply “I’m melting” and was accompanied by the silhouette of a running figure. Next, Mr. Johnson began making a message that read: “Whatever you do, don’t trust the snowman.”

As he formed those letters, passersby stopped to photograph him and inquire about the project. All the attention prompted Mr. Johnson to muse aloud about Thierry Guetta, a mysterious street artist character depicted in the 2010 film “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which was said to have been made by Banksy, the reclusive artist and prankster.

“Maybe I should take on a street artist persona right now like Mr. Brainwash,” he said, referring Mr. Guetta’s pseudonym. “And put a bunch of stuff on the Internet for sale for $20,000.”