Snout and Twood

I went to the pottery studio hoping for finished work, but it's still in the kiln. Here are two more atavisms, but I realized I'm fast approaching the point that I'm going to be too embarrassed by the names I gave these objects to post them.

USA-shaped Surrealist Objects

There are times when I want to spend 2 to 3 hours building absurdly complicated clay objects and there are other times when I want to kill some time at the pottery studio making small surrealist objects fit for leaving on shelves at Target or Safeway and freaking out the squares while blasting "Uptown Girl" on the iPod. There is a drawer full of cookie cutters, mostly for the children's classes and I found a cookie cutter in the shape of the continental United States. These small objects are a little too nice to be sacrificed to the corporate gods with paranoid messages scrawled on the opposite side.

The zombie mold is from a toy/model from the 1995 film Castle Freak directed by the great Stuart Gordon (Reanimator) and released by the Full Moon Enterprises. The spiral/dog turd shape is from a shell found on the Pacific seashore.


These three faces come from (again) Castle Freak, a particularly distorted mold of a meerschaum skull pipe, and a Bride of Frankenstein Halloween candle.


This mold comes from a crude plastic figurine of a Gray alien given to me by a student when I was an elementary school teacher.

Skull Shroom 3

This is my third skull shroom. It's also the largest: the mushroom cap has a diameter of 9 inches. There are 87 pieces attached to it, mostly molds of Halloween decorations. This one was made as a commission. I would say I'm reluctant to give it up, but I don't really have room for it.

Aysheaia pedunculata

This is one of my older Burgess Shale sculptures, from about six years ago, representing an extinct organism around 500 million years old. Aysheaia was a worm-like marine creature that probably fed on sponges. It is believed to be related to modern velvet worms.

Dragonfish

Monsters such as the dragonfish are under-represented in the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Fish which lie camouflaged under sediment in shallow water with poisonous spines are scary, but not a way that makes in-game combat feel like it could take place in a thrilling fantasy movie.




I wish I had made the eyes black.


The dragonfish in its natural habitat: the apartment pool.


Here I am role playing a careless Tiefling psion who wades in a shallow stream in a rare arboreal oasis in Athas.


Never, ever do this:

Warthog Column 3

I like the Nutmeg glaze on the face. The Plum on the ears was probably a mistake.

Cave and Eloy

Cave















Eloy












Ok, I admit it. They all have names.

Plumly and Blue Lucefuge

These are two more atavism sculptures. Some of them have names.



Plumly, named for the reddish glaze called Plum.
















Blue Lucefuge

New Atavism

This is a small, simple clay object inspired by the Mario games in which everything has a face on it. I'm still playing through Super Mario Galaxy after almost two years. Right now I'm stuck on the Cosmic Forest Race star, in which the player must race a shadowy anti-Mario entity through a difficult landscape. I have many, many similar atavistic sculptures similarly inspired that I'm going to be posting until my new work gets finished.

Ayahuasca

The object that was used to make this mold was an opaque black bottle with an ecstatic-looking face on it. For some reason, it made me think of ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic Peruvian concoction. Somehow, I failed to take a picture of the object before I got rid of it.

Antskulls

The Zuckuss Ant.


The Emperor Ant

Amiskwia saggitiformis

Amiskwia was an flattened swimming invertebrate found in the Burgess Shale. Those spots on the head are thought to be central ganglia. The relationship of Amiskwia to modern animals has yet to be determined.



This is my third attempt at a clay representation of Amiskwia (yes, I'm repeating the name over and over again. It's named for a river in Canada and that skw consonant cluster is fun to type.) For the first two attempts, I tried to portray it in the undulating, swimming position as pictured above. Each time, one of the tentacles around the mouth broke off and I ended up throwing it out. The third time, I made it flat and it survived, but it's just that: flat and not very appealing.

Tales from the Shelf 2

I continue to work my way through the Fiend Folio. This is a carp dragon.



I continue with the Star Wars imagery: Max Rebo, the Ortolan organist with an eating disorder from Return of the Jedi.



And I depart from previous themes with an interpretation of the my favorite song when I was about 3, "Teddy Bears' Picnic." Actually, it's meant to be a tanuki, a Japanese animal known in English as the raccoon dog, the folkloric equivalent of which is a mythic trickster figure with oversized testicles. Of course, there is also a tanuki suit in Super Mario Bros. 3, minus the big balls, and I'm planning on an interpretation of that bit of modern folklore as well.

Halloween Decoration 3

The last of the Halloween decoration objects for now. I don't remember where the mold for the face came from. The hands are once again from Jabba the Hutt's Quarren accountant known as Tessek by name, or pejoratively as Squid Head.


And here are all three Halloween objects in case you missed them the first time.

Halloween Decoration 2

The face on this piece is made from a very creepy plastic Christmas decoration of three soulless child-zombies singing hymns from the Necronomicon.

Halloween Decoration 1

The skull mold is from a Halloween nightlight. The spiral top is from a Bride of Frankenstein candle. The arms are from a mold of a piece of coral.

Beholder 4

Khargra

The khargra is a slightly less than classic monster from the first edition AD&D Fiend Folio. Khargra are creatures from the Elemental Plane of Earth (which itself seems to have gone missing in recent editions of the game) which burrow through solid rock like an earthworm through soil, but presumably without the beneficial effects to human agricultural efforts.


My interpretation of the khargra. The claws are molds of the hands of the "Squidhead"/Tessek figure from Return of the Jedi.




This is the rear view to show that the khargra has an anatomically correct anus. Baby's got back.