When my wife and I moved into a new house about 15 years ago, there was this piece of scrub Oak (Gambel) that I found in the empty lot next door, that had a cool deformity. When I found it, I knew I needed to do something with it, not sure what, but wanted to include it in one of my sculptures. To what degree I was unsure.
After it sat around the house for a few years, one day I had the courage to take a miter saw to it. I slowly started cutting away into the scrub oak, making sure that I did not cut to far into the deformity. First, I cut it in a rectangular shape, but the shape just did not mean much, so I stopped. Wandering around my yard, I found a dead Ponderosa Pine branch that had a unique angle to it. As I looked at the twig and then the scrub oak, I was trying to figure out how to integrate these two pieces of wood to create a nice uniformity and balance between these two natural elements. My decision was to cut a parallelogram out of the scrub oak, and then drilling a hole and put the pine branch through it to give a nice balance.
With many of my sculptures, birds are a theme. Now that the base was created, I needed to figure out what type of bird to sculpted. Living in Colorado, southeast of Denver, I was looking to choose a bird from our regional, considering both size and color I thought that a Mountain Bluebird was the right size and added that spark of color the sculpture needed.
