By now, it should come as no surprise to most of you that I have been odd my whole life. As a child I spent much of my summers either freely roaming my neighborhood with bare feet or indoors making macro or micro-sized art, often while listening to my sisters' broadway tapes and CDs without their knowing. Usually each summer was a different medium for me to mess around with. When I was five or so my dad showed me how to make paper, the next year I was consumed with water colors, then colored pencils, then pastels, even At age 12 I had resorted to a full scale acrylic mural across my bedroom walls. However, due to having lost almost all my art made prior to 2005 in the flood, there were several years that had neatly dissipated in my imperfect memory. Ironically, these were probably some of the longest held art obsessions of my seven to eleven year old life. As a testament to these years, amongst the children's books and rubber snakes that surfaced in that box, I recovered three of my most prized miniature sculptures, which I used to spend hours a day producing.
I had made many miniature metal sculptures like my otter, at my father's dental lab, first sculpting wax versions using a soldering gun and open flame, then casting them using the crucibles and left-over metal bits from past crowns and bridges. They had to be small because large ones wouldn't fit in the tooth-sized containers used to make the mold. The result was a virtually indestructible hand-made toy that could fit in my school blouse pocket, even in math class, without anyone being the wiser.
Though a much easier process utilized vast quantities of multicolored polymer clay and my mother's oven. Only two products of these endeavors seem to have survived in my parents' house till today partly due to their fragility, though mostly because I kept them in bins on the bottom shelf of the lowest lying room in the house in August 2005.
However inappropriate it may be to laugh at Jesus dying on the cross, I still find it really hard for me to keep a straight face when I even so much as glance at this. I think I may have intended it to be an Easter present for my devoutly Catholic grandmother. Honestly, I was probably too embarrassed to give it to her. I never really could grasp the proportons of the human body as a kid.
Now poison dart frogs on the other hand...
The left was my favorite rubber toy frog, though I had a total of 12 or so poison dart frogs total. Being an avid zoo and aquarium visitor as a child, I remember being bothered by my toy's fake-looking spot pattern. For that reason, around age 10 or so, I decided to take a stab at it myself. In case you were wondering, yes, I made each spot out of a tiny flattened piece of black clay and stuck it to the body of the frog. I was obsessed.
It was quite amusing seeing the oddity of my youth displayed in three dimensions, though I have quite a few more boxes left to go through. Bloated clay Jesus give me strength!
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