Bank Delivery

Delivering grizzlies has been challenging. Witness the narrow, dead-end alley off 27th St. in Billings that required extraordinary driving skills. There was the deep snow on Red Lodge Mountain and the cabin with no space to turn around. Unloading was one thing, but getting truck and trailer out was another. And there was the bank.

One grizzly can tell you that it's easier for a bank robber to get into a bank than it is for a bear--especially when you're a bear that weighs in at some 250 pounds with a girth of about 4'7". Height wasn't a problem. Weight, in point of fact, wasn't either. But that girth! (Obviously, our bear wintered well after larding on the fat with plenty of grubs, fish, and assorted other delicacies.)

The fact was, he just couldn't squeeze through the doors. The Shoshone First Bank of Cody, though, isn't an institution that turns away customers. Men in suits arrived, pushing out onto the sidewalk with welcome, examining the doors with an eye toward modifications. A woman with a guitar stopped to pat our grizzly on the shoulder (her height). Patrons with normal waists and hips paused, wishing the grizzly the best. "Is he going to make it?" they wondered aloud. Perhaps their thoughts also turned toward: "why would he want to?"

A small child gawked. "What?" was his question.

Summoned, the man who installed the undersized doors arrived, passing the overlarge bear without a glance, focused on the problem of the doors. "The moldings will have to come out," he said. "The controls will need to be taken down. Then we can remove the center post and the bear can enter." His voice was assured, the problem fixable.

"But ... ."

The bear sat and watched, waiting for the rest of the sentence.

"But I don't have time to do it today. You'll have to come back tomorrow."

The bear showed no emotional response. Perhaps when his artist, Denny Karshner, completes his persona, he will. But today he went peaceably back onto the trailer to return again tomorrow.

Here's the real deal photographed near the East entrance to Yellowstone last Spring. Give it another six weeks and these monarchs of the Rocky Mountains will be up and about, as their painted contemporaries will be moving around Park County.

There's real progress on reconstructing the new library, which will become the gathering point for the painted bears and which their sale will benefit. The teen area, which will be a paticular focus for the funds we raise, is framed out. The study rooms are almost visible.

The money that will furnish those rooms will come from the grizzly project. A special thanks to those who've been hauling the fiberglass bears around: Bob and Robin Berry, Bob and Yvonne Chandler, and Cook Moving and Storage.

A Grizzly Arrival

Two artists, Robin Berry and Pat Schermerhorn help unload one of their bears. This photo appeared in The Cody Enterprise.

Pat and Robin will be working in Robin's studio, a rustic building heated by a wood stove located behind the Berrys' B&B, The Robin's Nest on Alger Avenue in Cody.

To me, these two bears look right at home in their temporary home, something you can judge for yourself on the studio tour (more on that later, although it looks like it'll be scheduled for mid-March).

Cartoons and Small Bears

Even The Cody Enterprise cartoonist has felt the spirit of bears and painting!

(Papa Bear is saying: "They're doing that painted bear thing again. sigh.")

What's new in the project: Four more big bears will be delivered to artists this week, and a person can smell paint and creativity in the air. Jane Kellogg has her glass for her mosaic bear. Her mosaic students have plans for small bears, and there is a veritable run on the paper industry as artists sketch and discard ideas for their projects.

If you want to get in on the act and do a small (9") bear, call the Cody Country Art League, 307-587-3597. It takes a $80 deposit, which the artist gets back if he/she gives us the bear to sell. Anyone who wants to keep their finished product can do so--just forfeit the deposit.

Remember small bear people, we need the small bears back by 1 May if you want your bear entered in juried competition and, potentially, photographed for the festival catalog.

What's the point? All submitted small bears will be juried with the best selected for a silent auction held in conjunction with the big bear auction. Those bears will be on display during the summer months at the Cody Country Art League. Cash prizes will be awarded to the small bears that bring the highest price in the auction.

GRIZZLIES CROSS THE BORDER

The first fiberglass grizzlies crossed the Montana-Wyoming border on 31 January, heading south to Cody. Nine bears were delivered by our great volunteers--Bob and Robin Berry and Bob and Yvonne Chandler.

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.