Grell Shroom

The best Dungeons & Dragons monsters were the ones influenced by H.P. Lovecraft - the mind flayers, the grell, and to a lesser extent the aboleth.

The grell was a floating brain with a sharp beak, no eyes, and a mass of tentacles.

The Grell Shroom uses a brain-textured mold from a grell toy.

My dog Leona also makes an appearance in this picture:

Cthulhu Madonna

I wanted to make a Cthulhu Nativity scene, but I only got as far as the Cthulhu Madonna. I think she looks saintly and chaste for an extradimensional monstrosity from the Far Realm.

One of the tentacles broke off and in my limited experience, broken clay sculptures are rarely successfully mended with glue. The hat looks like a mortar board, but it's meant to be the same headdress worn by the Duchess.

Lira da Braccio

The source for this piece is The Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological Creatures by Richard Huber. This particular image is labeled "Grotesque face and female torso, from the body of a lira da braccio by Giovanni d'Andrea, Verona, 1511."

The lira da braccio was a violin-like stringed instrument of the Renaissance and since Giovanni d'Andrea the maker of lira da braccios lacks a Wikipedia page, I can only assume he was a pornographer who liked to combine images of bearded men and female breasts to whip the players of his instruments into an erotic frenzy.

4th Avenue Street Fair

My pottery studio had a booth at the 4th Avenue Street Fair. I sold pots for a few hours this morning. 

One of my small mold ornaments sold for $4.00, which means I get $2.80 after the studio's 30% cut.

The mold is made from a Bride of Frankenstein Halloween decoration candle.

Crucifixion and Centipede Swastikas

The crucifixion scene was meant to be offensive. I wanted to see if obnoxious content matter affected the survival rate of my work. The cross lost most of its bottom section, which could have been an accident or poor workmanship on my part, but the clay barbed wire looked like it had been wiped off the figure's forehead, which makes me think someone was offended. I was a little disappointed, but I guess the crucifixion was a success if it pissed someone off.

I found a plastic centipede with some leftover Halloween candy last year and it started an obsession with making molds. I made a swastika using the centipede mold and was curious to see if anyone at the studio would take offense.

The Nazi swastika actually rotates in the opposite direction, not that it matters. One person did actually ask me what the plaque-like object was for and I told her that I thought every Jewish household needed a clay swastika. She told me she was the daughter of Holocaust survivors and walked away, so I guess the question of whether a left-facing centipede swastika is offensive was answered. The use of a venomous, aggressive, many-legged horror to compose an alleged Nazi symbol could be interpreted as a statement on Nazism by an irreligious half-Jew, but I wouldn't want to insult the noble arthopods of the Sonoran desert with such an implication.

The centipede swastika mold was also used on the cap of this mushroom sculpture.

Anomalocaris

Anomalocaris means "odd shrimp" (although I remember how to spell it using ano malo which means bad anus in Spanish, not to be confused with año malo or bad year).
The odd shrimp it refers to is the shape of its mouthparts, which were thought to be a shrimp-like creature when the fossil was first discovered.

Menorahs

Can't Sleep; Clown Will Eat Me

The head of this column sculpture is based on the clown bed that Homer built for Bart in the Simpsons episode "Lisa's First Word."

Other Simpsons-related work, clockwise from the top:

• Zombie marge surrounded by 13 skulls


• Non-Zombie Marge


• Two Maggie Simpson coins


• Three Clay Collage faces containing portions of
  Maggie, C. Montgomery Burns, and Lisa respectively.

The Duchess

The character of the Duchess is often left out of film versions of Alice.

Perhaps the filmmakers are afraid of confusing the viewer with another unstable, violent, confusing female authority figure. Perhaps it is the demented songs that seem to promote child abuse (although who can resist joining in with the chorus of "Wow! wow! wow!"?)

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

Wow! wow! wow!

One of John Tenniel's original illustrations of the Duchess from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Duchess was the first boss in American McGee's Alice PC game. If she catches up with you, she gnaws on your head in a gruesome way. When she is defeated, she sneezes her own head off.

Screaming Cat Thing

Another cat-like entity, this time from Dr. Seuss' great work of literature, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. This one gave me nightmares as a child. I dreamed I was in a claustrophobic pod in outer space. There was an alien with a wide toothless mouth and its howl was not only physically painful to me, but it seemed to splinter me across space and time.

Here is a later reconstruction:

The rhyme that goes with it is:

I do not like
this one so well.
All he does
is yell,yell,yell.
I will not have this one about.
When he comes in
I put him out.

I once made another, larger version of this, but it exploded in the kiln due to some air trapped in the head behind the tongue. Among other casualties, it blew the foot off a Leg of Mutton. So it goes.

I once attempted to render the screaming cat thing's quiet, mouse-like counterpart in clay, but it turned to shit. So it goes.

Cat Columns of the Past

Here are four old cat column sculptures that I gave away as gifts.

Dan's Cat

A Cat for My Parents

Danielle's Cat

Lisa's Cat

Except for the mangling of the Jabberwocky poem, I liked Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland film when I saw it a few days ago. Now I'm reconsidering. I think it would have been a better movie if it had either been a new visual reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's books without the crappy adventure plot or a film version of the PC game American McGee's Alice.

New Cat Column

This is a new cat column sculpture to replace the last one which lost an ear.

This sculpture was damaged in several areas, probably while being transferred from the shelf into the kiln. It lost an eyelash, a tooth, and a rim of one of the nested cups that make up the column, as indicated by the arrows in the images below.

Cat Column with Eye Maggots

This is one of a series of column sculptures based on Lewis Carroll characters, in this case the venerable Cheshire Cat. This version has worm-like projections coming out of its eye sockets. It was mostly an experiment to see if they would survive the whole bisque kiln experience. Small projections are often lost.

I submitted this and two other sculptures for an exhibition called "The Monsters That Made Us." I received an email asking me to write an explanation how the sculptures fit into the the theme and I can't think of anything coherent to write.

Imitations of Random Thrift Store Objects

I haven't posted to this blog since November 2006. One of my recent clay projects was making copies/interpretations of figures from thrift stores. Here are the two that I completed before I got bored with it and moved on to something else.

Yes, Grandma is naked in my version.