Vertical wood sculpture: a long tapering spike rises from a mass with an emerging face, on a log base, work by Robert Bibeau

The Bear

A vertical stele of about eighty centimetres, carved from reddish-brown found wood, set on a section of trunk that keeps its bark. A long tapered blade rises from the mass toward a fine point; lower down, a circular knot with a hollowed core forms a kind of eye. The carving stays minimal: a few withdrawals, a light polishing, a cavity opened around the eye. Verticality does most of the work. An upright silhouette, held by its balance alone, set there the way one marks a threshold.

Back view: the raised wood blade above the log base

Wooden sculpture standing against a grey fieldstone wall, its pale head turned to the left and its red-brown trunk running out of the top of the frame, a potted aloe in the left foreground

Close view of the head against a white stucco wall, a small round eye hole in the pale muzzle and a wide dark knot just below it, the wooden point rising out of frame

Very tight framing on the head, where the bleached wood splits into fine cracks; the round eye hole sits above a wide knot ringed with dark grey that fills the lower half of the picture

The piece photographed against a painted canvas of a blue-grey forest scattered with red and yellow flowers, warm light turning the wood golden and deepening the shadow inside the round eye

Rear view against a painted forest backdrop, the muzzle turned to the right and the curved trunk running down to a sawn log base set on a dark round tabletop

The head seen from below against a clipped boxwood hedge, a brick wall and a patch of blue sky, sunlight separating the pale muzzle from the brown wood behind

The head and the two wooden points rising above a bed of ferns and shrubs in full sun, a row of brick houses and a concrete curb behind

Full view of the piece outdoors against a brick wall above a concrete foundation, standing on its sawn log base at the edge of a dark round table

Reading notes

Henry Moore accepted the form found in the material and revealed it through polishing. The path here is rawer: keep the driftwood's irregularity, add the minimal touch that tips the fragment of nature into a work of art.