Gabe Curry Bronze Casting Sculpture from BB Simmons on Vimeo.
The Listener (Pachycephalosaurus)
The reason this piece was created is because I wanted a dinosaur to come to life. Walking down the street one day I found a kid's "Golden book" about dinosaurs. The pictures drew me in until my imagination "kicked " over to the "Otherside". The side of imagination that triggers belief. I longed to see how these creatures really looked, moved, and sounded. Then it came to me, "I'm a sculptor, I'll just make one." I can't exactly remember why I chose a Pachycephalosaurus (which means thick headed), but it generated interesting thoughts. Having a literally thick skull was for the purpose of head butting. Head butting has evolved through the eons to have morphed into rams and even football players! Head butting is fun! This ties in with my theory that FUN drives evolution. It's fun to head butt, it's fun to run on two legs, and it's fun to fly. The fun of flying takes me to another one of my interesting thoughts: the evolution of birds. During the time of my sculpting I studied how dinosaurs developed wings. (There are several theories.) My birdwatching intensified. I sat quietly for long periods of time and watched. I carefully observed movement, made note of color patterns, and listened to twirttiling sounds from the throat of our birds and tried to imagine them emanating from their giant ancestors. I definitely went to the Otherside one afternoon when I dozed off in the backyard, to wake to a flock of Mourning Doves feeding on the ground. Opening my eyes, for two seconds, I BELIEVED that I was looking at a small heard of dinosaurs!
Believing brings me to another very important part of my life and my art which is internalizing. Internalizing takes deeply studying and mastering your subject so that it becomes part of the inside of you. You don't have niggling questions or doubts to stymie your thought process. Having the structure of your subject firmly set up in your brain allows for the smooth flow of imagining. These imaginings can lead to confidence for many useful activities such as: purposeful teaching (and learning) because you understand on a profound level. Art is made beyond depiction, to stimulate wonder . And connecting paths of ideas to REALLY have FUN in our fantastic world.
