Every piece of art goes through some form of the ‘ugly’ stage. It usually lies at that point where one tries to capture the immensity of a grand experience in something as limited as paint, pencil, clay or musical notes on a scale. The main goal is to endure the struggle with your medium long enough for it to speak to the poetry spinning inside you & from the subject. My cougar sculpture has re-entered the ugly stage… One hopes that by degrees, the ugly episodes yield to some higher state of beauty & grace. After struggling with this design for many months, I just had the chance to intensely study four mountain lions from life. Three, 7-hour days were spent just watching. I did make a few drawings and started two small sculptures on site but later discarded the latter. Sometimes our desire to ‘do’ gets in the way of our ability to see all of what lies before us…

  Here (above) I am comparing the skeletal features of the eye orbits with the sculpture at the right to make sure that a skull exists in that hunk of clay. I added the lines over the photo to give the reader a sense of where my mind travels on these exploratory missions of the subject. Eyes, ears and noses all must fall in their proper place and the skeleton is the roadmap for these and all features of the cat. Below is the a recent incarnation of the sculpture of the mountain lion. It has changed since this photo was taken and will continue to do so until the idea, the forms, anatomy and all the other factors begin to more tightly orbit my notion of what this work means.