Danny’s sculptures of metal, stone, and glass silently vibrate with physicality.  Made with heavy tools and his own considerable energy, he shapes and rends rock and steel into 1000 lbs forms that sit still, yet visually thrum with the echoes of repeating geometric lines, organic curves, and jagged angular edges.

“It’s a picture of movement in steel, and the flow-through of things,” says Kraus, referring to some of his pieces, “I often place shapes through and against other shapes, as if they’re going from one dimension to another.”  Rough against smooth.  Highly contrasting colors.  Human-made steel set against natural stone.  Two unlike and opposite design elements often collide in Kraus’ works.  It is this clash and contrast that his sculptures pursue as visual expressions of elemental forces colliding together in the kinds of dramatic acts of nature that Kraus deeply loves: “Earth quakes, volcanoes, storms at sea—it’s what I live for.  It was wonderful to be living in the hurricane zone as a kid and just be yelling at the gods in the strong wind.  It made me who I am.  I am not afraid of the elements.”

For over three decades, Kraus called a patch of ground alongside the Jocko River outside of Arlee his home.  But over the course of his lifetime, he sought out encounters with the forces of nature all over the globe—working on fishing and research vessels on the Pacific, working with big cats in Africa, and elephants in Oregon.  His sculptures give voice to the elemental forces he so loves, and their imprint on him.  Holding a drawing he made of Buddhist monks meditating in front of Mount Fuji, Danny makes a point about how and why he makes art.  Like those monks, his art making process allows him to be “still before the hugeness of the world but creating and entering into the beauty of it, and becoming part of it and not separate from the nature.”  

To learn more about Danny's work, you can contact him directly at his 'Little Bear Arts' sculpture garden and studio at (406) 396-3505.