Additional Images

Provenance:

Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 18 May 1979
Private Collection, British Columbia

Note:

Accompanied by a copy of the original invoice from Marion Scott Gallery.

Perhaps the consummate sculptor of bears, Pauta Saila found a delightful range of emotions and postures in the animal. Best known for bears delicately balanced on one leg, his subjects are often more winsome in character than fierce. His four-legged travelers, which evoke many of the characteristics which we associate most closely with the polar bear, are some of the least common in his oeuvre. Pauta, like his audience, clearly enjoyed the various nuances of his many iterations of the subject, explaining:

I carve bears with longer and shorter necks, some that are fat or lean. They are in different positions because bears are always doing something. Sudden moves are possible with shorter necks. Polar bears are like human beings. If they are not distracted they can see better, even when they move fast…I like to carve what I feel, not merely what I see. It is the feeling that goes along with whatever one is doing. I also think about the material, the stone. I like to think how to carve it so that it does not break. I do what the Creator wants me to do, not merely by seeing but by feeling too. Carving is very different from making a photograph. I think and feel that the bear has a spirit to be put into the carving. But each person has different thoughts when he is carving.

Today I am not worrying about making an amulet or a charm. I have to be pleased with what I am doing as does the person who is asking for the carving. I have to please myself and the buyer. At times I feel like keeping some of my carvings. In fact I have even said good-bye to some.[1]

The present exceptional example is sculpted on a large scale, and dates circa 1968. Cut from hard Markham Bay stone, Pauta has polished the bear to bring out mottled green and subtle bronze-brown hues.

[1] Bernadette Driscoll, Uumajut, Animal Imagery in Inuit Art (Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1985), 46.