Post #684993 by Gene S Morgan on Sun, Jul 7, 2013 8:36 PM

This next post Is a little background on sculpting in clay before I start Ipad sculpting. For a couple of decades from the late 60's into the 80's I was a potter and a sculptor. I sold my work at art and craft fairs around the Midwest. In this next part I show some examples of the kind of things I did. I must admit that most of the clay work I still have from those days is not very tiki. The only reason I have the ones I have illustrated here is that I did not get them sold 30 years ago. Sometimes they were not sold because I liked them so much myself that I priced them too high. The mud faced guy is a good example of that ….......

In the late 1960's when tiki was still going strong here in the Midwest I was in college and too broke to collect. My wife and I never were smokers, but after we were married my brother-in-law used to hang around our apartment and smoke constantly. He left ashes everywhere, so we went out and bought this Treasure Craft tiki ashtray just for him. He carried it around and never left ashes again. He died in 05', not from smoking, but cancer from playing golf too much in the sun without a hat.

This was the first kind of tiki I ever made. No matter where I traveled in my army days each base I was stationed at had a craft shop. We learned about clay and my wife even became a ceramics teacher.

My wife continued to teach after our army days and we bought this Duncan mold. We still have it. This kind of tiki mug was popular and we cast a whole bunch of them over the years. This tacky orange crystal glaze was very popular among her students.

I learned a lot about clay in those army craft shop days. For some reason there were some really good teachers hired by the military to keep us GIs occupied when not on duty. I wanted to be a potter at fist, but it took me awhile before I got any good at it. This book really got me started understanding clay. It was a kinda Zen approach to creating with clay. It was clay at it's simplest.

This book taught me a lot as well. I got this first English translation copy in 1971. It was my first real introduction to the beauty of the art of Polynesian culture. This book goes way beyond the basic tiki culture.

This carved ivory female figure from Tonga was a plate in the Oceanic Art book. I loved the simplicity but humanness of the face.

These stone faces are thought to be weather spirits from the island of Vao. These really appealed to my love of expressionism. I know they are primitive but also very modern art looking. This is the kind of island art that influenced me in the beginning.

The primitive human looking island carvings lead me to combine the pinch pot techniques I was using with clay in the beginning with human like faces. I made quite a few of these weed pots and this is the only one I have left because they were very popular at craft fair markets. I think this one did not sell at the time because it was quite small. I always tried to see how big and how small I could make this pinch pot stuff work.

I got more into slab building clay after I ran into these great books. Kenny demonstrated everything from folk art to modern sculpture. He made you want to have fun squeezing mud.

Mud mask always attracted me no matter what culture they came from. This one was from New Guinea. They had this wonderful free form stylized look that I loved.

This was my interpretation of a mud mask. It is a dark red clay fired to cone 1 with an iron oxide stain. Yes, macrame was a big thing back in the 70's.

This is a carved beam from Pao, West Malekula and also comes from the Oceanic Art book. I was drawn immediately to the round eyes, simple nose, and the elaborate designs surrounding the face.

My version done in cone 6 stoneware was a little more stylized. I made it as a mask over a drape mold.

There were a few cone 6 glazes made by Gare in those days. (maybe they still are) If I remember right this was a glaze I made myself. As you can see in the close up there was a subtle texture and color variations in it. I'm going to finally get to Ipad sculpting now. Just wanted to show that I used to get my hands dirty in the old days before I turned to pixel pushing.