New

At one point, I thought that making kanji out of clay might be fun. It wasn't, but I've had this object in a cabinet for about five years and I glazed it rather than throw it out or leave it in the desert.










This is the character for new

as in , the adjective new, atarashii

or , newspaper, shinbun.

Crone Alice and Pig Baby

Another old sculpture saved from oblivion only because I like its face. It's holding a pig baby like Alice in the "Pig and Pepper" chapter.

"By the by, what became of the baby?"
"It turned into a pig."
"I thought it would."
"Did you say pig or fig?"
"I said pig."

More Information

Here's the same picture of my work at Straw House Gallery, altered to give more information than you want or need.

Straw House Gallery

I had six pieces for sale at Straw House Gallery in Amado, AZ. I attended the artists' reception. They had some wine and snacks, a fire, a poetry reading, and a prayer circle. I sold four of my pieces: Nectocaris, Pikaia, Anomalocaris, and Wiwaxia. They sold for $35 each, which comes to $98 after the gallery takes its 30%, which is the most I've ever made from selling sculpture.

Stone-Colored Maggot Atavism

Self-Wrapping Shrieker Atavism

Cthulhu Madonna 3

Eventually, I'm hoping to make an entire Cthulhoid Nativity Scene, but so far, it's just been the Virgin Monstrosity over and over again.

Warthog Column 2

Yes, I Know It Looks Like a Pig

I also started a sculpture of the head of my deceased dog Chiqui. Yes, I know, it looks like a pig.

Copy of a Copy

I made a copy of some kid's copy of my beholder. It still doesn't look as disgusting and nasty as I would like, but it's an improvement over "cute and charming."

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.