Twilight Repose Sculpture

As with many of my sculptures this stone was rescued from a discard pile. Occasionally I get to visit the "bone yard" of an industrial stone mill and the discards found there, while not useful for construction, are perfect for creative endeavors. With help from the manager, we dug this lone piece of grey stone out of the pile, negotiated a price and loaded it up. It took a few months for the stone to tell me what it wanted to be, and of course, it was not what I had been designing. If there is one thing I have learned from stone it is to respect the stone by listening to it. So I started to carve a purely abstract sculpture and along the way discovered I was carving the essence and spirit of the black bear, currently on the Texas "Threatened/Endangered" list. I find it intriguing that stone quarried from Texas and discarded as worthless, desired to represent the spirit of an endangered species. Nature works in mysterious ways.