…among other things.

Tomorrow, Friday, is the first day of Three Star Owl‘s Open Studio, part of the Camelback Studio Tour.  The weather is supposed to be beautiful, but the meteorologists have less lovely predictions for Saturday and Sunday.  We’ll see.  Rain or shine, wind or calm, I’ll be here from 10 – 5 waiting for you to come by and check out the owly and non-owly wares.  Lots of mugs, by the way, from corn to ravens, snakes to scorpions.  And bowls, lots of bowls.

Here is a detail of a small jar fresh out of the kiln: each owlmorph is considerably less than an inch tall. >>

Three Star Owl is proud to be part of the South Scottsdale Art Alliance’s Camelback Studio Tour next Friday Saturday and Sunday, 25, 26, 27 Feb, from 10am – 5pm, and you’re invited!

<< detail, Greenish Beastie Pitcher, breast “plumage”

Several homes in the “we could have been but we voted not to be” historic neighborhood of Sherwood Heights, in what the sensitive prefer to refer to as “Original Scottsdale” between 54th and 60th Streets and Thomas and Oak, will be hosting more than twenty local artists in a variety of mediums on these days.  Everyone is welcome —  it’s free and it’s fun.

Three Star Owl (Studio 4) will have a small but pithy assortment of sculptural and functional clay items for sale (as they say, come early for best selection!), and throughout the weekend, I’ll be demonstrating hand-building techniques in my tiny and ramshackle studio space.  (And the always business-minded Cranky Owlet would like to remind potential shoppers that cash and personal checks are always welcome, but Three Star Owl is not set up to accept credit cards).

For more information and directions, click HERE, and click here for a map.  There will be signs around the neighborhood directing you to each host home.  If you have any questions or need further information, please don’t hesitate to contact Allison through this website’s Contact page.

Hope to see you there, rain or shine!

The Beasties are coming!

Here is a close-up of the finished surfaces of the same Beastie Pitchers shown in raw clay a couple of posts ago.  They, and other functional and sculptural ware, will be offered for sale at the upcoming Three Star Owl Open Studio, coming toward the end of this month!  Stay tuned for more details.

It’s the Return of the Beastie Pitcher! For those of you familiar with Three Star Owl “Beastie Ware” — functional clayware that looks like it might nip your fingers, or wrestle the napkin holder to the ground — here’s a march of the beastie pitchers: three in-progress, highly textured pitchers in various stages of drying, destined (if they survive their ordeal of fire) for an Open Studio/sale coming up in just over a month. Stay tuned for more details!

As long ago as the Old Kingdom (the middle of the third millenium BCE), the Egyptians used the eye of the Falcon — the eye of Horus, the falcon-headed deity — as an apotropaic, or protective symbol, wearing the still-popular faience amulets as personal ornament, or tucking them into the wrappings of mummies.

The Left Eye of Horus, also known as the Wedjat Eye, was known to be particularly potent, and its resurrective power was demonstrated by bringing Osirus back to life. According to the British Museum:

The name wedjat means ‘the sound one’, referring to the lunar left eye of Horus that was plucked out by his rival Seth during their conflict over the throne. The restoration of the eye is variously attributed to Thoth, Hathor or Isis. The injury to the eye and its subsequent healing were believed to be reflected in the waxing and waning of the moon.

Horus’s falcon counterpart is said to be the Lanner (Falco biarmicus), a falcon of southern Europe, Africa, and the middle east. We don’t have Lanners living wild in this hemisphere, but most falcons display the typical black “speed stripe” below the eye, like cheetahs, which is the distinctive characteristic of the Wedjat Eye symbol.  To illustrate, here’s a detail of a clay portrait of a native falcon I recently completed: the left eye of a male American kestrel, the smallest falcon in North America, and terrorizer of finches, grasshoppers, and small rodents.

Really, I don’t know if a Kestrel’s eye is so much a bringer of life, as it is a see-er of lunch, but, that’s life-giving to a kestrel, if not to the lunch.

“Don’t forget to VOLE, er… VOTE!!”

…Halloween Greetings from Three Star Owl.

(Photo, Detail of “Mother of Owls”, Allison Shock, smoke-fired terracotta, 2001)

What if you had to raise large numbers of owls, herds of owls, swarms of tiny owls, all at once? What if that was your job? What would you need? You might need an Owl Hive. Or a cluster of Owl Hives. What would an owl hive be like? Each hive would have to have entrances, so that the owls could fly in and out. There would have to be an interior chamber, so the owls could build their elaborate, communal owlcomb. There would have to be access for you the Owl Keeper, to extract whatever product the owl colony produced and stored inside, like vole honey or rabbit suede. It would need a lower hole to expel pellets and admit fresh air. At the very least, there would need to be a roof for the owls to land on, and a lofty perch from which to Keep an Eye on Things.

Here are some detail photos of unfinished architectural-effigy-nest-vessel-box objects in progress, some only bisqued, some completely innocent of the kiln as yet — the most recent Three Star Owl clay project. They might be Owl Hives. They might be sculpture or effigy vessels. They might be small ovens or incense censors. Or, they might be actors, waiting to be cast as archæological artifacts in an upcoming fiction post on this blog. Of course, they might be all of the above. Stay tuned to this location to see how it goes. (All photos and objects A.Shock)

…to bring you a tiny owlet.  From Pink to Dink, with hardly a blink.

Friday morning, I came home from delivering E to campus, and blissfully opened the back door to let in the first blast of coolish late summer air.  Instead of the usual morning quiet, the back yard was chattering with angry bird sounds: MOB!  Two Curve-billed thrashers, three cactus wrens, one Costa’s and two un-ID’d hummers, a verdin, a handful of Lesser goldfinch, and a couple of Gila woodpeckers, all shrieking in the upper branches of the messy African sumac right outside the bedroom door.

I stood under the canopy of snaggly twigs and miscellaneous branches for a while, with binox, until I saw the reason for their agitation: the Real Cranky Owlet.  A tiny, tiny owl, with a round head, staring down on me with enormous outrage.  I ran in to get binox and camera, and when I got back outside, it was sitting there still radiating high dudgeon.

It took a bit of hunting to find a window through the leafy snarl, but I finally got the owl in clear view.  At first I thought: it’s a recently fledged Western Screech Owl, too young for cranial tufts (ie, “ears”), wedged up in the twigs, trying to pretend it hadn’t been spotted by half the shouting avifauna of the yard, and one quarter of the interior mammals.  I’d recently been hearing a WESO calling at night in the yard, and we get them around here occasionally (well, they’re probably here all the time, but we hear or see them occasionally).  It was a likely candidate.

<< radiating high dudgeon

But… I looked again, without my binox: it was clearly not a screech owl — the bird was SO TINY!  As any birder will tell you, size is one of the hardest characteristics to judge in the field, and an easy place to go wrong. Comparisons are invaluable. The thrashers mobbing it were considerably bigger than the owl; it was about the same size as the Cactus wrens, although in a vertical format, rather than horizontally arranged like the wrens; it was approximately sparrow-sized.  There’s only one owl that dinky, in the desert or anywhere: the Elf owl (Micrathene whitneyi, en français chevêchette des saguaros, en español tecolotito anano).  The supercilious white “spectacles”, the reddish blotches on the breast, the size of the eyes in the smallish head: it was an Elf owl in our yard! I was able to get a couple of poor snapshots — tough light to boot — which I’ve posted here, magnified.

Like the Western screech owls, Elf owls may be in the neighborhood regularly; we live in an “older” (by Phoenix standards) subdivision with naturalized desert landscape, including mature saguaros with woodpecker holes.  But I hadn’t heard an Elf owl or seen one around here, and believe me, it wasn’t for not listening, or not looking in every saguaro hole I know about. So, since the Elf Owl population in our part of the state is seasonal, it’s also possible that this individual could be a migrant, moving out of its breeding area to its wintering zone, passing through our yard.

detail, Elf owl in saguaro vase (Allison Shock Three Star Owl, stoneware, 14″) >>

The sumac probably seemed like a good day roost.  But, unfortunately, it turned out there were not only hecklers, but a paparazza, and the tiny owl flew a few yards to lose itself in the denser, thorny canopy of the nearby Texas Ebony.  The hecklers followed, but I didn’t. (All photos A.Shock)

The yard’s been hopping, recently.  Click here to read an assortment of posts about what we see right outside our doors, birds and other things.