Though I am mostly a functional potter, I occasionally make little animals - mainly cats, bears, and rabbits - and I do teach a handbuilding class at Portland Pottery. A student asked me to show the class how to make a monkey! Well, I'm game, but I never made a monkey before.
With the little animals, I'm always walking a line between literality and whimsey. They are all intended to be somewhat comical, which I achieve by exaggerating certain proportions, but I need to get enough right to communicate what animal I had in mind. The face is especially important here! Which brings me to my latest effort. All it needs is a pair of cymbals to be the eponymous character of
the famous Stephen King story.
There are a lot of thing I got right about this monkey, and some I would do differently - for example, on a future attempt, I would make the hands solid & carve the fingers. What really jumps out though - almost literally! - are the eyes. Monkeys, unlike, say rabbits, have inset eyes, like people do. I used a tool to make the indents, then added flattened balls of clay, resulting in the zombie stare. This critter looks like it would come alive & kill you in your sleep! On a future piece I would make the eyes smaller, & the sockets deeper.
Believe me, I'm not dumping on myself here; the first one of anything I make is never the best one, and figuring out new pieces is a world of fun (& partly why I teach classes!) If you can't laugh when things go wrong, clay will kick your ass.
I'm going to fire it, anyway; it's possible that surface treatment will mitigate some of the cursed qualities of this object, and anyway I'm starting to feel some affection for my little murder-monkey. Stay tuned for that result!
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