Holy Crustacean

This object was straddling the divide between too good to throw away and too bad to keep,





but I like the face, so I kept it.

Bat-Rat-Spider Bas-Relief

I'm pleased to announce I'm no longer a home owner. As I was clearing out various cabinets, I found a lot of unfinished clay work from the early experimental years. Some of it was bad enough to throw away. Other pieces were bad enough to keep.


This is not really a bas-relief, but that's how I was thinking of it at the time, so I'm keeping it as part of the title.











It depicts the monster from the 1959 low-budget science fiction film The Angry Red Planet. I've heard it referred to as a bat-rat-spider.











It was also used on the cover of the Misfits' 1982 album Walk Among Us.









Acrylic Painting by Nicolas Caesar
The Angry Red Planet at IMDB

Someone Else's Beholder

This beholder sculpture was on the shelf for the kids' class. Either some kid plays Dungeons & Dragons, or he copied my beholders. I'm guessing the latter. Either way, as stated in an earlier post, my beholders were accused of being cute and charming, and this beholder is vile and disgusting. I'm a little jealous. I might attempt a copy of the copy.

Burgess Shale Fauna

I submitted six clay objects to a show called "No Deeper Blue" at the Straw House Gallery, somewhere south of Tucson. The text as I copied it reads: "An evening of artful prayer ... floor of the ancient ocean," with the ... standing in for where I can't read my own handwriting. The second phrase of that text definitely includes a lot of my work, particularly my Burgess Shale fauna period in 2004-2005.

Beholders

Beholders are classic D&D monsters: hideous, tyrannical, deadly, vicious, intensely evil. Someone at the pottery studio who saw these sculptures called them cute and charming and I'm a little disappointed.

Phacochoerus africanus

I began an attempt at a remake of the damaged Warthog Column.



A picture from a book titled Wild Animals that I used as a model:



The original Warthog Column, before the disaster:

IG-88 Menorah

Survivors of the Disaster

I forgot to mention yesterday that there were a few survivors of the shelf-collapsing disaster.






From left to right: Fish head, Twisted Column, Fear Fetish, Stacked Hexagram Atavism, Log, and three formless spawn/vagina dentatas.

Damaged Beyond Redemption

I'm moving into a new apartment and there is a shelf in the living room which was much sturdier looking than it actually was. There were some clay objects on top of and underneath and a lot of my favorite work of the last six years was destroyed.

Several objects are damaged beyond redemption, but I'm keeping them because I want to try to use them as models for copies. This never really works out. Occasionally it's better; usually it's not as good, but attempted copies are never anything like the original.

From Left to right: Skull Shroom, Giraffe Column, Warthog Column, Warlock


Other objects were too badly damaged and I felt the need to get rid of the corpses immediately. The cat column was actually only missing an ear but I don't like it very much and I like it even less without an ear.

From left to right: Log Sculpture, Crinoid Pilgrim, Cthulhu Madonna, Giraluna (second from left on linked page), Cat Column, Grell Shroom 2, Branching Column, IG-88 Column, Twisted Column.

The branching column never made it onto the blog. Here it is:

IG-88 Column

The recent IG-88 fixation began when I played a Dungeons & Dragons warforged barbarian and gave it the first robot/droid/construct-appropriate name that popped into my head: IG-88. I've been unable to part with the collection of Kenner Star Wars figures I started collecting when I was seven. I don't take them out and play out scenarios in which the grotesque monsters kill all the humans, but I was delighted to have an excuse to put them to good use in making molds. I have been unable to come up with a D&D-suitable miniature so far, but I did make this IG-88 column.

IG-88 had a few seconds of screen time in The Empire Strikes Back as one of the gruesome bounty hunters that Darth Vader hired to trap Luke Skywalker.

According to Wookieepedia, the IG-88 line of droids were programmed to be assassins. The scientists who created, programmed, and/or activated the droids for the first time underestimated the degree of sentience and the independent nature of their AI; the IG-88s' first action was to murder their creators. It reminds me of Frankenstein or the baby in It's Alive!

I'm disappointed that I'm not able to simulate the big clunky feet shown in the Kenner action figure in my sculpture. Whenever I try anything like that, the piece usually collapses before it dries or disintegrates in the bisque kiln.

Raiju

The raiju is a Japanese cryptozoological species that occasionally fall to earth during thunderstorms. It has been described as resembling a squirrel, cat, weasel, or seahorse, but this particular illustration is of a crab-like creature which fell from the sky in 1796 in Higo-kuni, Japan.

Here is the blog article which is the source of both the information and the original image. The original image is flipped vertically only because the image of my clay copy looks bad when flipped, so if you want to read the Japanese, you'll have to rotate it 180º again.

More Objects I'm Leaving Behind

Here are some more objects I'm leaving behind in the desert.

The first is a plaster Greek female head from the Columbus flea market in Columbus, NJ.
I left it in a random pack rat hole so that it looks like the rest of the body is buried too.










The second is the Cancer Bunny, former guardian of the compost. As I dumped it out, I'm impressed with the quality of the soil at the bottom of the pot and disappointed I didn't have anything to fertilize with it.

Comedic Relief

My vehicle needed $1000 worth of clutch work. I'm in the process of switching to new electric and gas services. I'm attempting to decide exactly how and by whom I want to be fucked over for internet service. I'm dismantling the old nest. I'm almost all set to become one of the Tucson pod people. Therefore, for comedic relief, I offer this very small squid-shaped clay object that I apparently priced for another economic era.

Table of Weird Clay Objects, Part 2

As promised, here is the other side of the Table of WCO. Note the IG-88 assassin droid mold towards the left/top side. I'm presently working on a menorah with IG-88s on each column.

Tribute to the Eldritch Hutch

I tend to personify inanimate objects. Letting go of some pieces of furniture feels like permanently saying goodbye to family. This large object was given to me when I moved into my first apartment in Piscataway, NJ. I used it as a bookcase for years, and later to display clay sculpture. A few days ago, I placed it on craigslist and within hours it was magically gone forever from my life.

Three Cthulhoid Objects

Yithian

In David Cronenberg's film Scanners, a seemingly schizophrenic homeless man turns out to have a variety of mental powers. He is eventually introduced to a whole community of people with similar powers. One of them is a sculptor who lives inside a giant sculpture of his own head. I feel like I've been living inside my own nervous system. I'm leaving this particular model of my mind, which manifests in the world as an isolated trailer in the wild lands west of the city of Tucson. I'm not sure if that counts as a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card for escaping the prison of myself, but it's at least a good excuse to change in some capacity.

This is a Yithian, also known as the Great Race, from "The Shadow Out of Time" by H.P. Lovecraft. The Great Race of Yith exists in earth's distant past. They are highly evolved, scholarly beings which maintain an epic library under what is now the Great Sandy Desert of Australia. They are eventually wiped out by a more aggressive alien invader, but are able to foresee this tragedy in time to transport their consciousnesses to the bodies of the great beetle-like creatures which dominate earth long after the extinction of Home sapiens. It was an early sculpture I attempted in 2004 and unfortunately fell apart before I had the chance to bisque fire it.

Table of Weird Clay Objects, Part 1

My kitchen island covered with all of the recent fragments and mold experiments. I would apologize for the obnoxious orientation but Google Analytics tells me I've had exactly zero visitors in the last month so fuck you, just turn the monitor on its side or laterally flex your fucking neck.

On a friendlier note, allow me to take you on a tour of Part 1 of the Table of Weird Clay Objects. The two stars on the left (that is, top) side were made as end-of-year gifts for my 2004-2005 third grade students. It didn't occur to me at the time how easily they could be used as weapons, but, FUCK YOU parents of my 2004-2005 students. It's much too late to sue me now. The two leftover stars were for Giselle, an artistic genius whose family moved back to Mexico weeks before the end of the school year, and Kassandra, a BAD GIRL who was banned from the end-of-year party and didn't show up the last day.

Then there are some creepy Barbie molds, my centipede swastika plaque, some Zombi Jesus Love pieces, assorted stars and bugs, and a series of experiments using the facial features of two male dolls used at the studio for serious figure study combined with various science fiction fragments.

Check back soon for the Other Side of the Table.

Joint of Mutton

This is another Lewis Carroll-themed sculpture depicting a character from the second Alice book that rarely gets the recognition it deserves in popular movies. The Tweedles made it into both Disney adaptations and the talking flowers at least made it into the 1951 cartoon, but the Joint of Mutton is invariably snubbed. The second book is modeled on a game of chess and after being insulted and confused by the two chess queens on her journey across the board, Alice becomes a queen herself when she makes it to the other side. She is given a banquet with the other queens, at which each course of the meal gets up and is introduced to Alice. Unfortunately, Alice is informed by her colleagues that eating food once one has been introduced to it is bad manners and each course is taken away before it can be eaten. Alice eventually uses her new queenly authority to demand that the food be brought back, but this only causes a bizarre explosion of chaos and Alice's hasty exit from her dreamworld.

Here is my first version of the Joint of Mutton, bowing politely so as not to be eaten. Part of its foot was blown off in the kiln so it doesn't stand very well. I made another one, but I gave it away as a gift and forgot to take a picture.

It's Better Than Bad; It's Good

More an excuse to play with the molds I made than any kind of creative outlet, I recently made these two log-like objects.

Observe if you will the sheer quantity of weird clay objects, soon to be relocated to a much smaller space.

What rolls down stairs
alone or in pairs,
and over your neighbor's dog?
What's great for a snack,
And fits on your back?
It's log, log, log

It's log, it's log,
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood.
It's log, it's log, it's better than bad, it's good.

Log from the Ren & Stimpy Show

Clay Objects I'm Leaving in the Desert

I'm leaving my desert home of seven years. It was my choice to leave but now that it's actually time to go, I can't imagine anywhere else ever feeling like home.

Here are some of the clay objects I'm leaving in the desert to be found by whoever buys the property from the bank or to disintegrate from exposure to the harsh elements.

This was an early sculpture of a megasquid that didn't turn out right, so I left it in a hole in the desert and let it get buried by years of flooding.

This is currently all that is left showing above ground.

This is the giraluna that I hurled at the wall when my car was broken into in October 2006.

This is a wiwaxia with a broken spine that was moved outside. I was hoping it might be stolen by disgruntled neighborhood teenagers, but apparently they have better taste than I thought.

This is an imitation Chinese dragon statue that I bought at the Columbus flea market in New Jersey.
It's missing a foot so I sculpted a substitute foot out of red modeling clay and used my dog Sheena's toenails for realism.

Sheena in all her squirrelly glory. Throughout her life she was plagued with a variety of canine skin diseases. After a few years in Arizona, the red clay foot contracted some skin diseases of its own and had to be thrown out.