“That’s an excellent question. I’ve been sculpting since I was a young child. The Bear was one of the first significant pieces of public art I made. I loved that it was for everyone to see and touch, not just for one family that could afford it.

I walked by the fountain almost every day as I walked to my job at a local art store. I started thinking there should be a sculpture in or near that fountain and that I could do it. I wanted it to commemorate the two primary life forms that inhabited the area before the Spanish and other European people arrived: the Indigenous People and the Grizzly Bears. One day, while walking past the site, I stopped, and a vision of it suddenly appeared, like a vignette, completed in bronze, shining brightly. At that moment, I knew it was going to become a reality. My heart flipped; I felt like laughing and crying simultaneously.

The significance of the sculpture, for me, is that it was the largest project I’d ever tackled. I didn’t know a thing about bronze sculpture then; I just knew it needed to be in bronze. My clear vision of it surpassed all the obstacles I faced in bringing it about. That hasn’t always proved true throughout my life, but it gave me confidence in my ability to create a vision.”

The young woman’s next question was, “I noticed you put triangles on your sculptures; why is this?”

“The triangles evolved from the maquette, the small working model I made of the proposed sculpture. I initially pushed the tool I used into the clay the maquette was made of. It was a quick way to symbolize the wet fur a Grizzly playing in the water has. As I worked, I realized it was a wonderful symbol of the spiritual world, grounding in the earth leading up to the sky. So, I also put them on the young Chumash girl. Friends helped me locate a young girl of that heritage, who posed for me to take photos so I could sculpt more accurately; she lived on or near the Santa Ynez reservation south of Santa Barbara. At the time, I wasn’t aware that there was another tribe, the Salinian, that also lived in the San Luis Obispo area. The triangles show up on other sculptures now, and sometimes, in my paintings, they are a reminder of the unity, the one-ness, the spirituality of all beings.”

Her third and last question was: “How many hours went into making the Bear and Child Sculpture, “Tuquski’ wa Suwa?”

“I kept some records of the time I put into the project, but not all:

The original sculpture did not include the two baby bears; they were added later at the request of the Von Stein family, who partially funded the project.

The Chumash child’s total sculpting time was 82 hours.
The Bear was about 72 hours of sculpting time.

Besides this, there were hours and hours of working on the maquettes, the first miniature versions of the sculptures, to show people what I had in mind, as well as the time spent talking to the several SLO City committees who had to approve it, the Chumash elders to give it their blessing, working at the foundry to oversee the process of casting the original work into bronze and the finishing work, locating the boulders placed around the sculpture, designing the fountain spray; and communicating with the woman who held a doctorate in the language of the Obispanian Chumash who helped me find a simple way of saying Bear and Child in that language, “Tuquski’ wa Suwa,” I wanted the sounds of those words to be spoken on that little piece of land again.