There’s a moment that happens when you live near the Great Smoky Mountains long enough. A black bear stops being a sighting—something you point at, photograph, and tell people about—and becomes a neighbor. You learn their routes. You recognize a sow you’ve seen before, this year with cubs trailing behind her. You start to understand that you’re not observing these animals so much as sharing a landscape with them.
The Bear Necessities 1.0 is my attempt to put that relationship into permanent form. In this post, I’ll share what the collection is, how a real bear in the field becomes a bronze in your hands, and where you can see the work in person.
I’ve been sculpting and painting black bears for years, but at some point the individual works started talking to each other. A bronze of a sow with her cub. A painting of a boar resting on a fallen log in the last light of evening. A graphite sketch of a yearling caught mid-gesture. Each one was a different answer to the same question: what is it actually like to live alongside these animals?
So I gathered them into a single body of work. The Bear Necessities 1.0 is my ongoing study of these wild neighbors—not as distant subjects, but as complex characters defined by strength, maternal tenderness, and survival.
The collection is multidisciplinary by design, because I’ve never believed a single medium can hold a creature this magnificent. In bronze, I go after weight and anatomy—the heavy shoulder of a boar, the unguarded imbalance of a cub in motion. In paint, I chase the light of the high country, placing the bears back into the expansive, atmospheric landscapes that shape them. And in graphite, I return to raw gesture—the fleeting expressions that reveal their intelligence.
Every piece in this collection starts in the field. The video above is the young bear that inspired The Juvenile. I watched it rise up on its hind legs exactly like this—all curiosity and wobble, still figuring out what it was. That posture, that specific in-between age when a bear is no longer a cub but not yet grown, is what I wanted to hold onto in bronze.
From field to finish: sculpt, wax, pour, and patina—all at Beaver Brook Studio & Foundry.
From that encounter, the piece moves through my studio and foundry: sculpted, molded, cast in bronze, and patinated—all under one roof at Beaver Brook Studio & Foundry here in Knoxville. Casting my own work is unusual for a sculptor, and it matters. Nothing leaves my hands until it leaves for good.
The Bear Necessities 1.0 currently includes:
You can page through the full collection—including the studies and sketches that started it all—in the Bear Necessities 1.0 catalog.
Bronze wants to be touched, circled, and seen in changing light. If you’re in the Southern Appalachians, you can experience pieces from the collection at:
Or browse available original works directly from the studio.
The “1.0” in the title is a promise. This collection will keep growing as long as I keep sharing a landscape with these animals—and there’s a monumental piece coming later this year that I can’t wait to show you.
If you’d like to be the first to see new work, studio updates, and pours from the foundry floor, become a Studio Insider. It’s the first place everything lands.
