Lepelara terrestris

This is a sculpture of Lepelara terrestris, one of the spectral plant species from Parallel Botany, Leo Leonni's psychedelic imaginary botany textbook.  I made it in 2004 or 2005.  Parallel Botany was one of my earliest source books.

Worm Giraluna

This is a piece from 2007 which I've posted about before.  Here it is again with some better (or at least larger) photos.  The giraluna is a spectral plant entity from Leo Lionni's classic alternate universe  textbook Parallel Botany.  This interpretation of it used a plastic worm mold which I wish I still had.

Cyclopean Giraluna

This is the Cyclopean Giraluna.  It's 18 inches tall, the tallest clay piece I've made.  The giraluna is one of the plants described in Parallel Botany, Leo Lionni's alternate universe botany textbook, one of my earliest inspirations for clay art.  I've made many of them over the past nine years.  This one doesn't have much in common with the giraluna as described in the book which have seeds which serve no purpose at all since the parallel plants do not reproduce, and not an ever vigilant eye. 

 

I just realized as taking these photos that the top part of the giraluna is also The Elder Sign, a symbol used in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (although the image of the eye in a five-pointed star itself is an invention of August Derleth).

Leo Lionni also wrote beautiful and psychedelic children's books such as Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse. 

Ent #2 with Foliage

This is Ent #2 without foliage.




This is Ent #2 with desert broom (Baccharis sarothroides) as foliage.




This is Ent #2 with Broccoli (Brassica oleracea) as foliage.

Ent #2

This is my second ent/treant,




based on this digital image by SirJarva on deviantart.



I didn't bother trying to replicate the lush foliage, but I'm going to make up for it plugging some broccoli into its hole.

Ent #1

This is my first Ent, with the hands raised over his head to represent foliage. Ent #1 is hollow and could be used as a vase. I was considering adding some plant to augment the effect.

Spare Oak Leaf

This oak leaf was damaged in an incorrectly fired bisque kiln, but I think it looks good enough after glazing.

Keys to the Palace of Spires

In Beyond the Crystal Cave, to enter the Palace of Spires, stronghold of the Dream Queen Soryth, the characters must collect four leaves to use as keys.




Shamrock (given by Leprechauns)




Oak Leaf (given by Satyrs and Wilden in the Green Glen)




Sprig of Mistletoe (given by pixies in the Summer Glade)




Rose Leaf (found in the Water Palace)

Key Drama

This is another image of the shamrock key, hung from the wall, without a glare.




This is the oak leaf key, but it appears to have been burnt and chipped in the kiln. Luckily it wasn't a terribly complicated piece to replicate.




The damage up close:

Shamrock Key

In this season of D&D Encounters, Beyond the Crystal Cave, four keys are needed to enter the fortress of the main villain Soryth. The keys are a shamrock, an oak leaf, a rose leaf, and a sprig of mistletoe, and this is the first one.




The color of the ultra cheap acrylic paint used is actually called "Shamrock." The picture below shows the color better, but I can't get it to come out without a distracting flash reflection.

Silver and Gold Giraluna

This is the Giraluna, the Dream Queen of Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany. This particular giraluna is a replacement for the one destroyed by my cat. Parallel Botany illustrates a taxon of imaginary plants which can best be described as undead.

Twig Blight #5

This is a late addition to the growing twig blight army that will probably be wiped out quickly by the violent power gamers. This one is meant to replace the one that disappeared from the kiln shelf, although I have another one coming up which is more directly modeled on the disappeared twig blight.

Twig Blight Swamp Vines

This is another variety of twig blights, different from the ones I posted last week. These ones are twig blight swamp vines, fey plant creatures that use their rope like appendages to keep their adversaries in a loving embrace long enough to eat their faces.

Twig Blights

These are twig blights, fey plant monsters for my D&D Encounters game. The image on the bottom right is the one that mysteriously disappeared from the kiln room shelf before it was fired.

The Applepussy Monstrosity

I have no idea what this is. It looks like a veiny apple with monstrous tits, lasciviously splayed legs, and a sphincter-like orifice in the front.









The Applepussy Monstrosity is based on a child's clay sculpture that I found on someone else's shelf on a night that I didn't have any brilliant ideas of my own. Here are the two objects side by side.









The view from above: it looks like it should be smokeable, and yet it's not.

Weeping Giraluna

This giraluna has tentacle-like protrusions instead of the usual sharp petals. A few of the protrusions tend to break off every time I move it.

Worm Giraluna

Giralunas (a play on the Spanish word for sunflower, girasol) are undead-like plants from Leo Lionni's alternate universe botany textbook, Parallel Botany. This one is made with a worm or caterpillar mold for the tendrils.

I made it during the year-long period that my pottery studio was located at the teacher/founder's home, after we were evicted from the warehouse by the railroad tracks, before our later homes on 4th Avenue and Dodge Avenue. The greenware (unbisqued) giraluna amazingly survived a year and a half in the hostile environment of Tucson weather with only minor damage.

Yet More Bongs

Two more unsuccessful bongs.

These are two tubolara, plant-like entities from Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany. The one on the right is also a bong.

Broken Giraluna & Missing Shroom

I went to the pottery studio on Sunday to pick up my work from the craft shows the two previous weekends. One piece, this giraluna that I've had for years, was broken.

Another piece, a recent mushroom, was missing. I resisted the atavistic urge to smash the broken giraluna in the street and write death threats against an imaginary shroom thief on the studio whiteboard and tried to look at it as a series of philosophical lessons. Stoneware sculpture feels permanent and has the potential to last for millenia, but in reality, especially for stoneware sculptures with a lot of tendrily protrusions, these objects are temporary structures which move in and out of my life like any other person, place or thing. As for the allegedly stolen shroom, ownership is temporary and sometimes these things tend to change hands without much warning; it could be viewed as a compliment that someone would like my little piece of anti-art enough to steal it. Less philosophically, I wondered if I could use the damage and theft to get a free month of studio membership and maybe some clay out of it.

Today I was pleased to learn that someone actually bought the missing shroom, which is a somewhat greater compliment than if it had been stolen. It sold for $15, which brings my grand total of sales for the two weekends to $33, of which I receive $23.10.

Giraluna in the Wall

My car was broken into and in trashing my house I threw one of the giralunas at the wall. It became embedded in the wall. Here it is.