Tony Natsoulas -- Featured Artist, February 1998
For the past 18 years, I have been sculpting life-size ceramic figures with expressive and humorous manners. Through these years certain themes have appeared in my work. One of the first themes to emerge was exploring inner-personal struggles. When I sculpt I get a better understanding of the different emotions and problems that intrigue me. "Paranoid in a fish market" was a piece that I made with this theme in mind. This piece deals with people confining their lives with phobias. The figure is responding to the fish eyes as if they were watching him, even though he knows the fish are dead. Inter-personal relationships was the next theme I added. I try to come to grips with certain situations that I find absurd or worrisome, by making the situations the subjects of my sculptures. "Whole in one" is such any example. This sculpture is of a female figure inside a male figure; I completed the woman and then built the man around her. You can look through the design in the man's clothing and mouth to see the woman inside of him. This piece addresses different roles between a man and a woman.
Social satire is another big part of my work. Bad political decisions and the way we treat the earth spark ideas for sculptures. In the piece "Silent Scream" I made the earth as an angry and frustrated figure with the continents in various places. I work on all these themes at the same time, but they are manifested in different sculptures. The subject of the sculpture can be as straightforward as my "Babbalon punk in the house" (a collaborative with artist Fred Babb) or a symbolic sculpture like "Walking the Dog" There are essential ingredients to my work that I try to put into each piece like humor, personality, scale, color energy and expression. I use humor as a tool to make the work of art more accessible to the viewer and to give the work an added dimension. All of the sculptures I make have individual personalities to me. It gets a little haunting in my studio late at night and I probably would not like to meet any of them in a dark alley.
I use the life-size scale to make the viewer feel the same presence as if standing in front of a real live person. I try to involve the viewer in a physical way with the work of art, not just with scale, but with the use of different props I put in the sculptures. Sometimes I include chairs for the viewer to sit in with the sculptures or mirrors for the viewers to share with the figures. Another way I try to involve the viewer is through body gestures by the figures and eye-piercing stares that hope to engage the viewer. I want my figures to look like they are frozen in some sort of great effort with exaggerated facial and body expressions. I also love color and use it in my work to accentuate the expression of the figure.
Like most artists, I start with an inspiration. Inspiration is a very elusive thing. Absurd TV shows, commercials, toys, cartoons, plays, and the movies inspire me the most. I also look at other artists such as Daumier, Red Grooms, Robert Arneson, David Gilhooly, Clayton Bailey, Big Daddy Roth and Arthur Gonzalez, to name a few. As a professional artist and student I have been very lucky to have been able to meet and show with most of the artists that pioneered the Northern California ceramic movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Their work and attitude has had a profound influence on my style.
After I get an idea of what the sculpture's subject will be, I simply begin sculpting the feet or shoes and then work my way up the figure. Sometimes I make a base first for stability, but I like the idea of my figures standing right on the ground. I do not usually make a sketch or model although I do look at reference photos for faces. I like the idea of not knowing how the piece will turn out, and not being tied down to a specific figure or even a specific face. Lately, I have been doing sculptures that are intuitive from the start, leaving out any preconceived ideas of what the sculpture will look like or be about. I just start sculpting the shoes and the idea and personality comes as the sculpture is developed. The idea of doing the whole piece intuitively came from the frustration of trying to convey specific messages to the viewer, and the viewer coming up with their own interpretations and missing my point. I found that my point was not what was important but that the image that I created sparked a viewer to think or react. I thought, why not build the sculpture and then interpret along with the viewer? I have found this process more successful and rewarding.
One of the things that was taught at my years at Davis, by Robert Arneson and other professors there, was , "the idea first, technique second." Finding an idea, or being inspired, cannot be taught, but technique can be learned by direct or accidental ways. I find that by buying pre-mixed "sculpture mix" clay from a local clay company, I save my health, and get a more consistent and plastic clay. I have mixed many loads of clay and my back and lungs feel it, not to mention the enormous expenditure of time. When I am going full speed I use one ton of clay a month. After mixing many glazes, doing tests and risking my health, I am happy to go and buy the hundreds of low fire commercial glazes I use in my work.
I build my figures in sections to fit into my electric kilns. Working in sections also makes transportation much easier, since one sculpture can weigh up to two hundred pounds. The largest kiln I own is 28 inches in diameter by 36 inches deep. I bisque my pieces for about three days at cone 02 which allows me to build the walls of my work as thick as needed. After the piece has been bisqued, I glaze it with gloss glazes. I usually layer three variations of the same colored glaze to get deep, rich colors. My works are glaze-fired at cone 06.
I separate the figures into sections at natural divisions, the shoes from the pants, the pants from the shirt, the arms or hands from the shirt sleeves and the head from the collar. Most of the time I glue the eye balls in last, through the neck. I have found making the eyes separately brings the face more alive.
When beginning a piece, I sculpt the shoes solid for strength and weight. Most of the time I attach cylinders to the shoes and make shoes separate from the pants to get more height in the sculpture. Waiting until the shoes get leather hard, I make tubes for pants from slabs that I cut off the blocks of clay. I use slabs because they sag like cloth. The slabs are about a half an inch to three quarters of an inch thick. I put texture and folds in at this point. When the clay gets leather hard I add more slabs to the pants until I get to the belt. I can only work about a foot a day before the piece gives from the softness of the clay, so I work on several figures at once. When I get to the top of the pants I let it get stiff and put a flange down inside the pants which is the beginning of the shirt. I continue putting slabs up to make the shirt. When the shirt is finished, I make the head and hands solid, separate from the figure, and then hollow them out. I sculpt the neck and wrists into cork-like tubes that slip into the collar and sleeves.
"Colonial Pride" was inspired by a small, commercially made pewter figurine my wife, Donna bought me at an antique shop. Like my other pieces I built the figure up daily, taking about a month to complete the entire piece. The idea, among others, that emerged for me was the humorous vanity of the eighteenth-century man. He is looking into a mirror, fixing his hair. I put in a real mirror and have it positioned so when you are standing next to him you can see yourself, involving you in the sculpture. He also has a big wart on his nose with a long black hair growing out of it to make him seem even more beautiful.
My latest work is a series of sculpted TV sets on found tables. In the TV format I can make several figures interacting with one another and have the figures in a created environment, not just an implied environment as in the free standing figures. I am also enlarging and cropping different parts of the figure.
Clay is a wonderful medium that records every touch of an artist. But a great collaboration of materials is clay and bronze for my work. I recently completed a bronze sculpture, "Balancing act, too," for the Downtown Plaza in Sacramento, where I used clay, with all of its texture-recording abilities and ease of sculpting, and had it cast in bronze, which not only locks the sculpting and texture, but has the tensile strength to give me the freedom to put the sculpture in any position I need. This sculpture was painted with car paint.
Inner-personal discovery continues to be an everlasting source of inspiration for my work. I use humor, gesture, color and expression as the basic tools to carry out my ideas. Other visual media play an important role in developing the characters of the sculptures. Trusting my intuition gives me the freedom to develop the sculptures' personalities and to watch them unfold as I work. My techniques are ever-changing, to enhance each sculpture's uniqueness.
You can see my work in my Artist Resource portfolio .
copyright Tony Natsoulas email: fishtone@jps.net
