Featured Artists

This space features a few artists from the project. The entries will be changed regularly, so check back frequently.

Bob Seabeck

Robert Seabeck works within a tradition of realism that has been a strong direction historically in American art. His subjects include landscapes, wildlife, flowers and vehicles. Born in Casper, Wyoming, Seabeck attended four colleges majoring in art at each. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at California State in Long Beach and his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Wyoming in Laramie in 1976.
From 1978 to 1992, Seabeck served as an artist-in-residence for the Wyoming Arts Council, and has demonstrated painting at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody for the past eleven years. His art is displayed in a number of corporate and private collections and museums including the El Paso Museum of Art, the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming State Museum at Cheyenne, the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody.

Bob Jacob
Bob Jacob was born and raised in northeastern Oklahoma. His mother, a vocalist, pianist and china painter, provided the creative yin; his father, an accountant and fun-loving sportsman, the yang. In the early years, Bob tempted bass with a top-water plug, plunked away on the piano and learned the finer points of finessing wild ducks to a decoy spread.
He turned more of his attention to oil painting as his writing and photojournalism career began to wind down in the late ‘90s. Classes at the Art Students League of Denver were followed by regular group painting sessions at Cody Country Art League. One of the greatest influences in moving him toward spreading pigment was attending the 1997 Quick Draw at the Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale, where he observed the late Dean St. Clair complete a one-hour gem. That piece now hangs in Bob’s historic Cody home.

Lana Perrotti


I love the act of creating and painting…the challenge and sometimes anxiety of the first mark and of filling a blank “canvas” with rich pastel pigments. When you look at these pigments they make you hungry! If you mix pastel…you get mud. You have to create layers of pigment and it gives the viewer a sense of unbelievable depth, dimension, and clarity of color. I love to play with the medium. Sometimes just making marks side by side on a good paper is insightful…the pigments are so pure its always surprising what you might come up with and what you might use in your next work



Denny Karchner

Denny has been a graphic artist since the age of thirteen, later attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Shortly after graduating, under the strong influence of Pittsburgh artist, Andy Warhol, he turned to screen printing as an art form. For the next twenty-five years, he owned and managed a large screen print operation in Pennsylvania. Later, as a "high-end" illustrator for Vanity Fair's screen printing operation in Tampa, Florida, he designed and developed graphics for the likes of the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NCAA, Nascar and Harley-Davidison. More recently, Denny has produced graphics and oils that have passed though the Buffalo Bill Historical Center Art Auctions. He has two pieces hanging permanently in the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia. Another facet of Denny's art career has been the privilege of producing NFL player portraits from the 50s, 60s, and 70s for Art Rooney, Jr., the son of late, great owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is currently commissioned to paint some of the newer Steeler players for the Steeler organization.

The Sculptor

Jeffrey Burnham Rudolph's studio is set in a lot where weeds hide the bits and pieces of things that might become part of a work of art. I park my car in a clear area and look around, deciding that it would take an artist to see beauty in a bit of concrete shrouded in tumbleweeds or in a rusty stack of rebar sprouting dead sunflower centers. The building is no more promising, a squat, two-story structure that someone has punched with holes of varying sizes. Framed, they do duty as small windows, one big overhead door, and a pedestrian access. The latter was white, once, and is now marked by scuffs and dings.

Nothing hints at the pleasures for the soul hiding inside where plank stairs access a rustic balcony that rings three sides of the studio. Both stairs and balcony serve to showcase sculptures. But first, before letting the eye stray that far, it’s necessary to sort out dozens of other impressions from the jumble of objects, equipment, and sculptures in various stages of completion. On this visit, I notice a bronze rabbit I hadn’t seen before and decide, once again, that this studio contains magic. You step in and things just appear—it’s a magician’s hat sort of place.

Actually, the rabbit and everything else on view take hard work, muscle, and a great deal of knowledge to produce. The sculptor is a carpenter and metallurgist. He or she works with chemicals and composites, with rocks and clay. He must have the eye of an architect and the education of an engineer. Then and only then, it seems, does he have free scope to exercise his natural artistic talents.

Jeff, who’s a native of Cody, got his first knowledge of art in his father’s carpenter shop. It was there that he came to love the beauty of wood and discovered the satisfaction that comes from modeling a natural material. Still, he didn’t set his heart on becoming a sculptor until he took a sculpture as an elective in college. A year later he had a job in a foundry, and not long after he graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in fine arts. Since then, he’s won many awards for his work and exhibits regularly in galleries in Cody and in Golden, Colorado.


Sculpting in stone is Jeff’s admitted first love, but he enjoys other mediums. For the Grizzly Gathering project, he began with blocks of Styrofoam. These he glued together to create a cubist object of about the same size and dimension as he hoped to see the finished product. That done, he sawed off corners, rounded off edges and cut out hunks of material to give himself a sort of filled-out armature. With his basic form ready, the real work could begin. Now, using buckets of plaster, he began molding the features, sanding the dried layers, and adding more plaster.
During its creation, the great, white grizzly dominated Jeff’s studio. Sitting squarely in its center and surrounded by pots of plaster and layers of plaster dust, it focused attention on itself. Here was true magic.

On my last visit before the plaster bear left to be cloned into fiberglass, I picked my way back through the weeds to my car feeling a bit sad. I would miss the big guy. But, then, almost stumbling over some metal poles, I smiled. Some day, these bits of scrap metal would be unrecognizable. With a bit of conjuration, a dash of technical know-how, and a ton of hard work, they would emerge from the weeds, enter the studio, and become—what? Another bit of magic, of course.

The Project

Thanks to the contributions of dozens of volunteers, the financial assistance of many supporters, and the creative work of almost thirty artists, the Big Horn Basin of northwestern Wyoming will host twenty-five giant painted fiberglass grizzlies during the summer of 2008.

This project is about libraries, art, and youth, and the latter have contributed their share already, beginning with a parade entry during the 2007 Fourth of July celebrations. It will continue as they paint many small models of the large bear and submit them for a juried competition.

The best of the small bears--nine-inch models--as determined by a jury from the Cody Country Art League, will be exhibited during the summer and sold at silent auction at the same time as the large bears are auctioned. Cash awards will go to the artists whose bears bring the highest amount.

All funds raised by this project will go to the Park County Library Foundation and into an account to be used for supporting the youth and childrens libraries in Park County. What will the proceeds from this project buy? Books and audio/visual materials, smart boards and televisions, computers and MP-3 players, study carels and study rooms. We want all children in Park County to have access to the best educational materials and study environment we can provide.