My Pottery Projects

I'm not just a novice theologian-- I'm also a novice potter! While I should be embarassed to share my work in both areas, my ego compels me to post both. Here are some projects I've made that I thought were kind of neat. As I said, I am a novice, so don't judge my stuff to harshly!

Jack Skellington Luminaire
I made this as a Christmas present for a friend (my now girlfriend) who has a macabre sensibility and a bias against Christmas because of its sentimentality. It is based on the character of Jack Skellington from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and has holes cut out so that you can burn a candle underneath to create a spooky effect.












Influential German Jerks Mugs
Karl, Adolph, and Friedrich
This was an assortment of mugs I did to represent the worst and most devastating to western thought and human life that Germany had to offer the world. Not because I have any bias against Germans, but just because it sounded like a funny idea. I started with Karl Marx, went next to Hitler, and rounded it off with Nietzsche. I had one issue with the color of Karl's beard because I wasn't used the the glaze.
While I meant to create a darker gray on his chin hair and mustache, it ended up looking like he'd been enjoying a blueberry slushy. 














Marvin the Paranoid Android Sculpture
While I prefer the 1981 BBC mini-series to the 2005 Hollywood adaptation, Marvin in the Hollywood version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had a great look that I thought would be fun to reproduce using thrown pieces. So, I got on the wheel to make a globular head, a thick bottomed torso that I could cut away at later, and two legs to hold them both up. I then attached them and sculpted feet and arms on top of them.










Picasso's Guernica in 3D
I had been thinking about Picasso's famous painting and decided it would be interesting to try to reproduce it in three dimensions, a task that I later realized would be tougher than I had suspected. Because Picasso alters spatial relationships so much, attempting to place this piece into a real life context involved making my own decisions about what to emphasize, cover over, ignore, etc. As a result, I took out certain sections entirely, others I placed into different positions, and some I painted instead of sculpting. I had a lot of fun with this one, and I think it turned out quite nicely.
















Cab Calloway Jug
I love Calloway's music and figured no one else had probably made a likeness of him in clay. The jug was actually thrown by my good friend Chris Woods as a set of jugs for faces to be sculpted onto. He kindly let me use this very nice form.







Nosferatu Mug
This piece is based on the likeness of the villain (tragic hero?) of F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 vampire film Nosferatu. I also borrowed from some of the features from the creature in Werner Herzog's 1979 remake. As this piece was drying (once the features had already been applied), a crack began to form on the bottom. Instead of throwing all of my work away, I decided to try to fill the crack, which entailed making the bottom much thicker than it should have been. As a result, this piece is rather weighty. However, it looks pretty cool.










Alvin Plantinga Mug
A mug using the likeness of famed contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga. This piece was done around the same time as Nosferatu, and also unfortunately had a crack show up on the bottom after drying, which required a new bottom to be placed onto it. This added extra unnecessary weight and a visible line that runs through the beard. Unfortunate, but still a decent piece.










Aristotle Mug
Just a mug based on the likeness of the 4th century B.C. philosopher. :-)







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