80-year-old sculptor creates pair of huge, dancing bears

Nobody would blame local sculptor Bob Stayton if he was slowing down a bit; after all, the long-time Bigfork gallery owner celebrated his 80th birthday on Nov. 11. But don’t tell that to Stayton, who just completed a pair of bronze dancing bears that stand nine feet tall for a new development.

Thanks to new technology that allowed the original 15-foot tall piece to be blown up and enlarged by a computer and automated foam carving machine, Stayton was able to sculpt the enormous pair.

“By doing it that way you get an exact duplicate of what we wanted,” he said. “And when you get as old as I am, you have no business being up on a scaffold.”

Stayton said that the old way to enlarge a sculpture was essentially to do it again using foam and lumber, then coating that creation in a layer of clay and putting in the details for the cast.

“We had to literally re-sculpt the whole thing,” Stayton said.

“It took three and a half hours with the machine,” he said. “It took eight to 12 weeks the old way.”

Even so, from the time Stayton started molding the bears out of clay in his Bigfork studio to the final monstrous bronzes being ready to ship took just a week or two shy of a year. That is, in part, because even after the long process required to get the molds and casts ready to pour the bronze, the bears had to be poured in pieces and then welded together. After the many pieces are welded and ground down, there’s still multiple levels of sandblasting and applying the patina — water-soluble acids that are used to color bronze. From start to finish at Kalispell Art Casting, where the work was done, about 25 people had a hand in the work.

The dancing bruins are, appropriately, going to be a main fixture at the Dancing Bear Village, a luxury condominium development on Bay Drive on the south side of Bigfork Bay.

“We wanted something unique,” said real estate broker John Pearson, with Riverbend Realty. “An old-time European village-type feel.”

Pearson said the units, which range in size from 2,600 to 3,700 square feet and in price from $2.5 to $3.5 million, would be “unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” The first of the seven units for sale will be finished this spring.

“The owners are from Sidney and that’s where Bob is from, so it was natural,” he said.

Stayton said the bears will be mounted on a large steel disc that will be attached to a motor to rotate the pair one full rotation each hour.

Stayton’s Western sculpture is well-known in Bigfork and around the West, no small feat considering he came to the art at the age of 53 after successful careers in architecture, interior design and education. Stayton and his wife Mary have now been at Buffalo Trails Gallery in the Bigfork Station building for 12 years and at one location or another in Bigfork for more than 20.

Despite his late start, Stayton’s list of honors is long and includes the “People’s Choice: Best Sculptor” award at the C.M. Russell Auction in Great Falls in 1996. And thanks to a childhood spent around horses, ranches and the life on the range near Great Falls, he has plenty of material to choose from, much of it safely lodged in his memory.

“I want to sculpt the things that I knew and what I had observed,” he told the Eagle in 2007. “I work from the memories that I have of my life.”