Despite having spent hundreds of hours watching bison, I never tire of observing them. Where others may see a docile, lumbering animal in a slow-moving herd, I see a deep landscape of gesture nuance of form and individual character. As I begin work on a new bison piece, I find myself yet again, with sketchbook and pen in hand.
There is always more to learn. The bison are different today than they will be tomorrow, or in a month. Today, their heads are down, working to grasp the barely emerging nubs of grass coming up amid fickle spring weather. A month from now, the hunger-sharp hip bones of the winter weary cows will begin to round out, and the greening fields will be littered with rusty-red calves full of life and energy. The bison will be different yet again in late summer, when the drama of the rut signals the beginning of another cycle.
Bison possess a lot more depth and beauty than they’re afforded when most people observe them, a perfect metaphor for so many things we take for granted. Showing the capacity of an animal – like a bison – to have not only individual physical traits, but innate fears, desires, preferences, makes them all the more fascinating and familiar. I feel the artist’s job is to reveal the overlooked magic in the ‘every day’ things of life. And so I am here again with bison, watching, observing, modeling, drawing – finding a way to communicate what I see in these remarkable animals.
gost test
This time of year in Yellowstone, the margin between life and death is thin. Rarely are the relationships between animals and the landscape more evident than in late winter, when the contrast between hunter and hunted, between survival and… not, is stark. We have much to witness, and a great deal to learn.
Wire and wood form the spine and legs of the armature with some newspaper added in to take up the extra space.
in my mind immediately jumped to some of the research on Yellowstone wolves showing how the body gestures of wolves convey the seriousness of their hunting efforts to their prey. When wolves have zeroed in on a particular animal, their gait increases, their head is lowered and tail straightened out to the back, rather than up as their heads and tails are when searching out a prospective meal. With this in mind, I looked back at our female Labrador, Casey, who had a ‘hunting’ body posture as she was darting amongst the prickly pear cactus. I wondered if this was signaling to those deer what the wolves do during a chase? From there, my mind jumped to the fact that wolves and coyotes must get spines in their feet during some of these chases. This gave me the overwhelming feeling of empathy for them in that powerlessness state of not being able to tend to their own injuries, or not having people to care for them as our dogs do. We all know this feeling to a degree when we become injured or encounter things, people, situations in life that we cannot change. 
To fight them does no good, to complain often does even less – SO, I began thinking of a piece that spoke to that notion. Once I got home I made a quick sketch on paper (above) out of my head of the position our male Labrador takes when worrying his feet from cactus spines. I wanted to use those gestures as exemplified by a coyote as the subject to convey this idea. I later made this small wax study to test the idea in 3D (to the right & below). I soon felt that it needed something ‘more’ and the cactus (scaled to south Texas size as our cactus are quite small in Montana) seemed to balance the design nicely – as well as to lend context to the animal’s slightly unusual position.
