Gila monsters (Heloderma suspectum) are large stumpy lizards with bright handsome markings that are both cryptic and aposematic simultaneously, and whose hands look like neoprene wetsuit gloves with claws.  They are remarkable for being one of only two venomous lizard species in the world.  They live in the Sonoran and southern Great Basin Deserts and love to eat quail eggs, nestling birds and mammals, and other slow-moving prey items. (Below: captive gila monster on a wooden schoolhouse floor, photo A.Shock)

Approximately life-sized clay Gila Monster “bowls” are items I only make one or two of per year or so. They’re quite time-consuming, since they’re textured, slipped, and glazed pretty much beaded scale by beaded scale.  Here’s one now :

1)  I form a blob of clay that looks like a gila monster.  This early stage is the time to get any sinuousness in the tail, neck and belly, so the clay “remembers” it.  Then it’s time to put the wet lump aside to set up, or stiffen slightly, so that it can be shaped further.  Sponges help hold a pose, if desired.  >>

2)  As the water leaves it, the clay becomes more self-supporting.  While waiting for this to happen, I make legs — oddly spindly for such a stout body — with blocked out feet, to stiffen for adding later.  I also hollow out two thick places in the monster body, to aid in drying: the head, and the base of the tail.  This also makes the completed piece lighter and better balanced.  It is important to make a tiny, invisible passage into the hollow part from the outside, to let air escape during firing, or there could be an explosion.  <<

3)   With the clay slightly stiffer, I smooth the shape into its final form, including carving the toes from the blocked-out “hands”, and rounding the belly “bowl” part.  This shape causes herp boys to giggle, because it makes the lizard look like roadkill to those with scavenging permits for heloderm pelts.  From my point of view, it makes the piece functional, if desired: an Effigy Vessel, and not just a representation.

4)  The next step is to attach the legs, and texture the skin.  This must be done at a particular point of dryness, when the clay is still wet enough to accept the stamps I use to make the “nail-heads” in the skin (Heloderma means “nail-skin”), but stiff enough to hold up to the handling and pressure of stamping it.  Then it’s waiting for it to be bone-dry for slipping (right).  >>

The belly-texture, which looks like pink-and-black Indian corn on the cob, is carved into the clay rather than stamped — this is particularly time-consuming, especially for a part that isn’t seen very frequently.  Early on, I searched the web for a reference photo for Gi-Mo belly-scales, and never found one.  Fortunately, I persuaded a handler at a wildlife education event to flip a live one up for photos (she held it vertically, not upside-down), and got this great shot, which tells me all I need to know about what the unders of a monster look like, including vent details (<< left).  You can just see the heavy-duty cowhide welding gloves the handler was wearing; they were covered with black half-moons: venom-marks from previous crabby bites.  <<

5)  Slipping an item bone dry is slightly risky, as adding water to a piece at this point can cause cracking.  But adding slip to a dry surface gives a crisper, less texture-obscuring coating.  I use a combo of commercial under-glazes and slips I make in the studio.  It’s necessary at this point to choose the subspecies: the banded H.s. cinctum from the northern part of its range, or H.s. suspectum from the southern part, which has a more complicated reticulated pattern.  This one is kind of a combo. >>

6) After bisquing, I glaze the piece with dots (another labor and time-intensive step), each dot on the raised nail-head part of the texture, with a combination of black and pinkish-orange glazes.  After it’s fired, this adds depth of color and a glint to the lizard’s skin, similar to the fresh skin of a newly-molted lizard.  Sometimes, I add a leather tongue, if the monster’s mouth has been made slightly opened.  I’m looking into making a fully-open mouth next time, with wire teeth, giving it a really venomous-looking gape.  Here’s a shot of the finished version, a little more bulbous than an authentic lizard, but — after all, it’s a bowl:

Etymology

As mentioned above, Heloderma means “nail-skin”, for the fact that the monster’s skin looks studded or beaded rather than scaled.  suspectum, the species name, comes from the fact that early herpetologists were uncertain if the animal were venomous or not, and only suspected it was because of anecdotal accounts of its potentially lethal bite.  Eventually it was confirmed by laboratory experiments, and dissection, which revealed the large venom glands in the lower jaw.

Check out more info about the natural history of these lizards here.

All photos A.Shock

…who stopped by to visit Three Star Owl at the Audubon Arizona Gifts from Nature fundraiser and show in Scottsdale this Friday and Saturday.  The rain stayed away, and it was nice to see everyone out and about!  Special thanks to everyone at Audubon Arizona, for once again wrangling a great show!

(photo: smoke-fired coati effigy vessel, photo and piece by A.Shock)

It’s hard to believe that I have to jump right into gearing up for Wings Over Willcox, the Sandhill Crane and birding and nature festival coming up in Willcox, AZ, in the middle of next month (details here)!

Thanks again to you all, and Happy Holidays!

…for those of us who decide to enter the Fray, this is the kind of thing you’ll be up against:

Yes, the Holidays must be upon us, it’s the traditional Santa Hat-Wearing Wiener Dog on a Bun with Lettuce and Mustard Effigy Vessel (featuring removable lid), now appearing at your local discount department store.  Oh, Why didn’t I buy this when I saw it?

(cell phone photo A.Shock)

Spotting coatis in Sabino canyon was fortunate in many ways.  Not only is it always amazing to see a coati, but it was artistically inspiring, too.  Before the Tucson visit I had already begun a small coati effigy bowl, so on returning home I was all fired up to finish it and start another bigger one, images of live animals fresh in my head to draw from.

(left: pair of coati effigy bowls in various states of completion; photo A.Shock)

The little one is sculpted, textured, and burnished — bone-dry and awaiting bisque-firing.  The bigger one is still wet, with sponges propping up a tail that wants to slump forward, and a plastic bag over the head to keep the snout workable for a little longer.  (Our cool fall weather is keeping things drying at a snail’s pace, frustrating when you’re trying to get things through the studio rapidly, with the holidays coming up).

Sometimes clay places practical limitations on forms, and there’s no way to make tails as gloriously long and sinuous as real coati tails. But the snouty-shoulderyness of the climbing-digging critters is do-able, as is the higher-in back posture that makes them look like they’re always trundling downhill.  These pieces are destined for sawdust-firing, I think, so the smoky coloration of the twilight-colored desert animals should be suitably earthy, but I’m still thinking about how to get the spectacles and the rings to be visible but not too contrasty.

The little one is apparently a male.  Be sure to click to enlarge.

(All photos A.Shock)

Rat, pig, dog, hedgehog, chupacabra, what?

The answer is all of the above.  Long a mainstay of Three Star Owl sculptural subjects, this pointy-ended, feisty-looking, toothy mammal has been called all of them.  And that would be correct — called a “rαtdog” for convenience — it stands for Every Mammal, including us human ones.  Rαtdogs represent the Mammalian experience, and are intended to repulse and appeal simultaneously.  My hope is that people will want to pick one up, even though it looks like it might bite, or transmit a disease.

Above is the latest rαtdog piece, “FishDog Stack”, fresh from its smoky firing.  Like the related piece Toadstack, it’s mainly about heterotrophy: eating other organisms, but only because rαtdogs haven’t figured out how to synthesize cholorophyll yet.  FishDog Stack just trundled off to its new home this afternoon, which always makes me happy.

(Photo A.Shock.  Currently there’s a detail of FishDog Stack on my Homepage.  Also check out an image of an earlier rαtdog piece “Acorn Competition” in the Gallery — click on the third thumbnail at the bottom.)

The past three days I’ve been immersed in clay.  Sounds muddy, but what I mean is, of course, NCECA: demos, tools, galleries, other clay artists, techniques, long-time friends from St. Louis, Metro Light Rail, even a little shopping, and downtown Phoenix: all those things compressed into a fairly short amount of time, in three long but stimulating days.

The Potters as Sculptors, Sculptors as Potters show was fabulous, and folks who made the trip out to Mesa Community College saw a broad yet focused themed show that added a lot to the exhibition experience at NCECA.  The room was light and spacious, and packed full of pairs of pieces showing the range in various artists’ work, and how they deal with the duality of making both vessels and sculpture.  (Here’s a shot looking into the gallery.  My pieces, Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy and Venomosity are the two objects nearest to the camera.)  Saint Louis clay artist James Ibur finessed an adroit and thoughtful piece of curation in organizing this show, as well as doing a lot of hard work.

The bulk of the event was deep in the bowels of the Phoenix Convention Center, and almost all of it was nearly simultaneous.  To make the most of NCECA you have to be good at time management and willing to switch gears mid-stream.  I watched a Korean Onggi potter make really big pots in the traditional style.  He made the coil of beige clay at his foot by stretching 25 pounds of clay all at once on the floor like a giant taffy loop.  He would then rest the coil on his shoulder while feeding it onto the top of the pot.  He said at home each potter made 30 of these in a day!  That’s a lot of kim-che storage — and a lot of clay.

There were also on-site installations constructed during the course of the meeting, like this one of a California gray whale made of clay packed onto slat-armature.  The mini-whale in red clay on the boxes is the artist’s maquette, and you can just see a few slats still un-clayed at the far left edge of the photo.

The NCECA exhibitors’ hall is also a great place to shop for the latest tool, equipment, or silly clay tee-shirt (“Throwing my life away” “Tee-shirt for my clay body”, etc).  But the best tool ideas I picked up were being used by the demonstrators, like this one used by the Korean potter above: it’s a wooden hand-held anvil used on the inside of the pot while the outside is beaten with a wooden paddle.  This thins the clay and compresses it, making the walls of the pot stronger and reinforcing the joins between the coils.  Wood tends to stick to wet clay, so the face of the tool has been textured so it releases more easily.  It also leaves a great texture behind.  But, it wasn’t available for sale in the exhibition hall, so if you want one, you’ll have to make it yourself (I’ve always used a river-cobble as an anvil).

I mentioned shopping, and that’s because much of the art on display was for sale.  Probably the most notorious selling frenzy at the conference is the Cup Benefit sale, where artists donate cups for a sale, the proceeds of which go to art scholarships.  The cups are displayed for two days, then, on the third day, they throw open the doors and let people in a few at a time to shop. The cups are donated by lots of artists, from plain folk to rock-star potters — the most famous names in the business — so the line to get in is long, and people arrive early.  By early I mean 4.30am!  Although I had my eye on a specacular piece with burrowing owls stencilled on it, it was long gone by the time I got in.  So I contented myself with two appealling cups by potters unknown to me — oddly, both named Reilly/Riley.

There’s a property of owls I call “Half-Dome Head.”  It’s a shape that’s noticeable in the profile of all owls, particularly the larger ones.  The Barred Owl to the right is exhibiting major Half-Dome Head.  If Half-Dome Head can be achieved when making owls in clay, the resulting effigies will be Especially Owly.

The name derives from the famous granitic dome formation, Half Dome, in Yosemite Valley, California, which bears an obvious resemblance to an owl’s head in profile.  The geologic Half Dome is forming largely by weathering: eons of sheet-exfoliation on the fragmented face of an exposed granodioritic batholith gave it the shape we see today.  (Appropriately, one of the most Half-Dome-Headed owls ever, the regal Great Gray Owl, is an uncommon resident of Yosemite Valley, see photo below: the color and texture even match).

In owls, the “Half-Dome Head” effect arises from the front of the Owl’s head (in other words its face, to use the technical term) being shaped like a radar dish, to be efficient at gathering sensory input — in other words, light and sound.  But take away the feathers and an owl’s cranium is shaped pretty much like a hawk’s, or even a chicken’s skull (check out these images).  An owl is after all a bird, albeit a fairly specialized one, so it’s built like a bird.  The forward-oriented flat face that we humans find so fascinating (probably for anthropocentric reasons) is due more to posture and feather-arrangement than underlying skeletal structure: the owl generally holds its bill slightly downward rather than forward like other birds.  This gives prominence to the distinctive “facial disc” — the specialized array of radar-dish-like plumage around an owl’s eyes and ears — and positions it so it functions optimally.

The owl’s Facial Disc is a precise specialization for nocturnal hunters who require every available bit of light and sound directed into their sensory apparatus to ensure the highest possible success rate while hunting.  Several features of the facial disc are noticeable: short flat-lying feathers sweep away from the eyes and “cheeks” so as not to impede forward vision; stiff vertically-arranged feathers edging the facial disc help funnel sound into the ear openings, which are asymetrically arranged on either side of the face behind the eye to create aural parallax (and are nowhere near the cranial tufts we commonly call “ears”); and rictal bristles (“whiskers”), which are specialized sensitive filamental feathers on either side of the gape (the flexible corners of the mouth which allow the beak to open and close), that enable the owl to perform preening and feeding activities — including the feeding of owlets — by feel, since their large eyes are immovable in the skull and so can’t focus efficiently at very close ranges.

But that’s just the flat front of the “Half-Dome”: the round back, the helmet-shaped fullness of feathers on the back of an owl’s head also transmits owliness to our perception.  This is also due to the owl’s skeletal configuration: the bird’s upright posture is possible because its skull is joined to a nearly vertical spine.  Most birds’ backs go off at a more or less right angle to their necks (think of a dove), somewhat shortening the curve at the back of the head.  But the feathers on the back of an owl’s head arc smoothly down to the back, which continues downward steeply.  The photo above shows Half-Dome head creating Owliness in an MLO (Moderately Large Owl) I’m currently working on for a client.

Photos: from top to bottom: IBO barred owl, A.Shock; Half Dome Yosemite, Carroll Ann Hodges, USGS; Great Gray owl, Canada (Sorry; don’t know who to credit this photo to); Three Star Owl “eared” owl effigy in progress, A.Shock.  And finally, a Gratuitous Cranky Owlet chillin’ with the Big Boys…

As I mentioned previously, there are two pieces of mine in the NCECA “Potters as Sculptors; Sculptors as Potters” show currently up at Mesa Community College (see the Three Star Owl Events page for details).  One of them is the long-evolving “Toadstack” (the other is Venomosity which can currently be viewed on the Home page.) As promised, here is the entire Toadstack story in pictures, culminating in the final state of the piece.  They go from L to R and Top to Bottom; don’t forget you can click on an image to enlarge it:

and the finished piece, Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy (Toadlier than Teapotly):

This show is associated with the annual NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) Convention, which opens in town tomorrow (Wed 8 April).  From now until Saturday, Phoenix will be popping with potters, sculptors, and ceramic arts educators.  The downtown Phoenix Convention Center is the main venue, where the discussions, demos, lectures, and exhibitors will be located.  There’s a fee to attend that part of the conference, but there are many many galleries, museums and other display venues which have shows up featuring the work of both nationally known and local clay artists, and these shows are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

So if you like looking at the broad range of contemporary ceramic artwork and what’s being made in America today in clay, check out the NCECA website for lists of and maps to the concurrent shows and outlying venues which are all over the metro area.  Principal show clusters are located in Tempe, in and around the ASU Campus; Mesa, at both the Community College and the Arts Center; downtown Phoenix in the hotels around the Convention Center; and Scottsdale, in the Old Town Arts District, a fun and stimulating place to visit anyway.  It’s a great time in Phoenix to Get Out and See Art.

The final increments of the imperturbable Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy (or Toadstack for short) have been completed, and after months of being alternately obsessed on and ignored, left alone and detailed, the piece is finished and ready for its destination.  Here are its last two phases: a final coat of white terra sigillata (super-fine suspension of clay in water), and smoke-firing.

The Toadstack looks bleached because it’s had a second layer of terra sigillata brushed onto it, and lightly buffed back, so it remains mostly in the low points of the textures.  Terra sigillata is slip — clay and water and sometimes a mineral colorant — but the clay particles in it are finer than regular slip mixtures, so the surface can be buffed with a cloth or even the fingers to a satiny sheen.  The second photo is for later comparison: it’s a close-up of the skin of the red-spotted toad: if all goes as planned, what’s white will turn smokey brown-black, and what’s red will be a mix of red and black randomly.

Next the Toadstack is loaded into the galvanized trash can “kiln”.  Surrounded by shredded paper and sawdust of two chunkinesses, and some pine twigs and needles from the Hen’s tree, it will be completely covered before lighting.  Here in Phoenix you’ve got to remember to call Maricopa County Air Quality hotline before ignition to make sure there are no wood-burning bans in place, which this night, there weren’t.  The weather was perfect: cool, and with only a light breeze and no burn-bans, so I torched the can.  The dry combustibles burn fairly fast and sweet-smelling because I use both cedar chips and mesquite twigs from our trees, so within a couple of hours the smoke has dwindled to nearly nothing.  But even after the fire burns down, the heat is still fierce.  If the pieces were to be removed into the cool air they could crack, so I clamp the can’s lid on and let them cool overnight.  The next morning I opened the “kiln”, and unpacked the pieces.  The kiln fates were kind, and no cracks or other problems found, so the Toadstack was taken inside and cleaned up a bit for photographing.  Here is the comparison close-up of the Red-spotted toad’s skin — all is well, and the smoke has made its dramatic and unpredictable changes:

The Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy is destined to be shown at the “Potters as Sculptors, Sculptors as Potters” show organized by St. Louis artist James Ibur at NCECA this year, so it’s hardly fair to unveil it before the opening.  The exhibition will be at:

Mesa Community College, 1833 W. Southern Avenue, 480-461-7524.  Navajo Room, Kirk Student Center  Apr 6-11, 2009.  Mon-Fri 9:00a.m.- 5:00p.m., Sat 9:00a.m.- 2:00p.m.

Potters as Sculptors; Sculptors as Potters: artists included are Dan Anderson, Jeri Au, Dan Barnett, Chris Berti, Victor Bassman, Peter Beasecker, Gina Bobrowski, Susan Bostwick, Joe Bova, Andy Brayman, Wayne Branum, Bill Broulliard, Richard Burkett, Doug Casebeer, Joe Chesla, Linda Christiansen, Eddie Dominguez, Renee Deall, Josh DeWeese, Paul Dresang, Rick Dunn, Tim Eberhardt, Shanna Fliegel, Debra Fritts, Gloria Fuchs, Julia Galloway, Pete Halladay, Sam Harvey, Rick Hensley, Jason Hess, Eric Hoefer, James Ibur, Nick Joerling, Steve Lee, Jimmy Liu, Beth Lo, Allegheny Meadows, Ron Meyers, Boomer Moore, Eric Nichols, Brooke Noble, Lisa Orr, Donna Polseno, Liz Quackenbush, Ruth Reese, Dave Regan, Don Reitz, Allison Shock, Chris Staley, Richard Swanson, Kurt Weiser, Matt Wilt, Betty Woodman, Russell Wrankle, and Luo Xioping.  Utility is the core concept of the show: How does a person working in clay approach it if that is the primary focus of their work?  If it is not, how do they perceive function when it is juxtaposed against their non-functional art?  Many ceramic artists explore and/or exist equally in both the world of function and sculpture.  In this exhibition, the artists will be exhibiting work that explores both of these ideas by presenting two pieces of their work.  Organized by James Ibur.

I’m exhibiting two pieces, the Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy (Toadlier than Teapotly), and Venomosity, a Gila-monster inspired Beastie vessel.

There will be a free reception, open to the public, on the evening of Friday April 10, in the Navajo Room (location, above). Everyone’s invited!

If you can’t make the reception at the Mesa Community College, you’ll have to wait for one Final Increment on this website…  Until then, here is a sneak preview of Venomosity ➤➤