2016, 60 ” x 27″ x 24″,Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire
I made a second sculpture of Big Daddy Roth, this time, he is in a car with objects flying off the car. I wanted to show movement in the piece, as if the car was actually in motion and objects were being thrown from the car and its speed.
2011, 96" x 22 x 28, Media: Earthenware / Terracotta, Firing Process: Electric, Oxidation, Surface: Glazed
2021, 68″ x 36″ x 28,Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire
This is another one in a series I am still doing 20 years later. The series is called my “Art Hero” series and so far is comprised of these portraits; Picasso, Clayton Bailey, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Basil Wolverton, Robert Arneson, Robert Crumb, Alexander Calder, Rube Goldberg, and Keith Haring. The reason I am doing this series is to explore the Artists that influenced me when I was growing up and ultimately influenced my art-making. I wanted to study their techniques, imagery, and lives. This is another artist that I saw when our family would go back to see the relatives and also see the amazing museums in NYC. I love the idea of not just having a sculpture there alone. Having something the sculpture is interacting with or brings the sculpture into an environment is something I like to do. Having a Calder-like mobile above him suggests he is somewhere other than just in a gallery. I grew up in a Mid Century Modern home in Davis, CA, and my wife and I bought one very similar. We love that style because it is very sentimental to us. I think Calder embodies that era. Also, his attitude towards art-making is playful and childlike as is Picasso's. The circus he made that the Whitney Art Museum owns is wonderful! I remember seeing it as a youngster. I put two characters in his pockets. Also, his giant mobile at the National Art Museum is breathtaking.
2021, 41″ x 28″ x 28″,Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire
This is the second portrait of Clayton I have done. In this one, I concentrated more on his love of UFOs and robots. This is from an interview with the Smithsonian: I’d never heard of Clayton before. I still was in High school in 1977, but I was able to take the classes from then, graduate student, Kelly Detweiler under Arneson at UCD. Kelly had taken us to Clayton’s “the Museum of the Wonders of the World” it was above Juanita’s Restaurant in Port Costa, California. It was just the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life. I went to Disneyland, and this was 100 times better because one guy made it and it was just the most fanciful thing I’d ever seen. And we got to sit down and talk to him. it was a pseudo museum. It was pretty small. But you walked in, and he had all these artifacts under glass boxes, and then he also had some that were just on pedestals, like he had a full skeleton of Bigfoot. He had a giant skull of Cyclops. And he had doctors working on patients – absolutely gross, but I loved them. And then he had this little plaque on the wall that was really wild. I was 18, so I was still a kid. He had the – a comparison between human penises and Bigfoot penises, and he had this whole thing going on, where he said that the Bigfoot penises were double-jointed and how much better they were than the human’s. He gave me the piece later as a trade for his website. I’m sure he didn’t remember me from back then, but later on, he asked me to come to talk to his class. Just from showing my slides at his school once, we became more and more friends. He was teaching at Hayward State University, California and he put me into two shows where he selected – the Artists Select Artists Show, which I think was really nice of him to do. And I don’t know, I just – it was – It’s just so wonderful to see meet someone and then become friends with them later on, to see your hero and become friends with him. It’s just – it’s an honor. It’s just fantastic. So that’s sort of how it goes. Every time I go over to his house and studio there, just there’s more stuff to see, and he’s always so really encouraging. It’s just great. And he marries people, we asked him to be our minister– at our wedding, and he married us. And The funny strange thing is we thought since he’s so wacky – we thought that he was going to do something really funny, and – but he was so serious. I mean, he takes that really, really seriously. He had a whole thing written out, and it was wonderful. It was really special, and it was pretty amazing. It meant so much to us both to have someone we know, love, and respect marry us. And who knows us too, both Clayton and his wife Betty. He gave us the Bone of Contentment while marrying us. A gold-leafed, huge wishbone with our hair encapsulated in it and our names and wedding date on it.
2021, 83 x 53 x 48″,Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire
When I was growing up, my father, who taught at the local university (UCD), would bring home lots of books for me to look at. He brought home one on Rube Goldberg and I fell in love. His work was so amazing and like nothing, I had seen before. His cartoonish style was beautiful to my young eyes and brain. His work stuck with me as Clayton’s did all of these years.
In this sculpture of Rube Goldberg, I wanted to tell the story of his life through a machine he may have illustrated. He said the idea of his pieces is to make a simple task into a complicated one, like humans do everyday in their lives. It is called “How to put whipped cream on pie” He had titles to all of his drawings that were similar and mundane, "A Simple Idea for an Automatic Device for Emptying Ash Trays", “Automatic Weight Reducing Machine" and "A Simple Device For Taking Your Own Picture". The portrait was from a photograph of him in 1929 and the machine was inspired by “Idea to Keep You from Forgetting to Mail Your Wife’s Letter” illustration.
2021, 93 ” x 24″ x 24″,Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire
Keith Haring’s work was all around us when we were in undergrad and graduate school. His were is very nostalgic to me. My friends and I would go to San Francisco every month and see all of the galleries and museums. Also, I would go to NYC from time to time and there was a Keith Haring show. I love his sense of playfulness and what it all stood for, love and getting along. He was an amazing person and a wonderful artist. I put him inside the TVs because he said he grew up on all of the shows I did and they influenced him very much. Also, he could always make art anywhere, even in these close quarters.
2021, 73″ x 53″ x 23″,Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire
I choose to do a portrait of Annie Lennox, not only for the wonderful music she has made but her dedication to activism she has. I remember getting all of the Eurythmics’ albums on cassette tapes and listening to them over and over again in my various studios as I was working on my work. Then when Annie went solo I got all of her albums on CD. I still listen to her music as I work and listened to her beautiful voice nothing else while I made this portrait. In this portrait, I wanted to show not only her beauty but where she came from and what she believes in. I put her in a baroque dress and hairstyle because she always seems to be like royalty to me. The circle of neon represents the organization she started to further the rights and issues of girls and women around the world. She is also wearing a medal from 2010 Appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her work fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa. The man’s hat represents her musical partner, Dave Stewart, and her masculine dress when she was in the band with him. She put together an exhibition called “The house of Annie Lennox” The house on the back of the piece represents my idea of her house that she grew up in Scotland. In the windows are the piano, which she plays, and a microphone. Each of the nooks in her dress represents a song or an event in her life.
2021, 68 x 63 x 64″,Firing Process: Electric, Low-fire
In the portrait of Carlos, I made as he may have looked when Santana played at Woodstock. Big hair.
I tried to make his guitar look like snake skin because the story goes he was high on Acid and hallucinated that his guitar turned into a snake while he was playing a solo.
On the sculptures shirt I painted one of my favorite albums of his, Caravanserai. I have his eyes closed in meditation and he is emerging from a huge psychedelic, because he was from that San Francisco 1960s scene. I put Fillmore West on his back, because that is where he got his first start.
The drum represents all of the Latin rhythms in their music.
2021, 72 x 36″ x 36″
I first saw Sister Rosetta Tharpe on a clip in the 2001 movie “Amélie”, my favorite movie of all time. The main character and the man who lived downstairs would leave inspirational VHS tapes for each other on their doorsteps. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was playing her heart out on the clip, singing and playing a flashy electric guitar! I fell in love with her and all of her exuberance. I looked her up and got all of her music and listen to it a lot. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a gospel singer who bridged gospel and rock and roll music from the 1920s to the 1970s. She influenced Elvis, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, and many others. She was named Godmother of Rock ‘N’ Roll. I decided to have her singing into a microphone like she was recording a song for a record. She is emerging out of a tour bus. She was one of the first musicians to have a tour bus because she could not stay in hotels in the south. The roses in the windows represent her backup singers called the Rosettes. Also, the hummingbirds represent the Dixie Hummingbirds that were her other backup singers. The Bus is turning around a Decca record which symbolizes her relentless need to be on the road performing. The reference to Carnegie Hall is where she played in 1938 and got a lot of recognition for that. The bus is painted in the lesbian pride flag. She was married 3 times to men but had a long relationship with another singer Marie Knight who she toured with too. The whole piece is sitting on a box, because of her always thinking out of it. She would do religious shows and night clubs shows. She would rub elbows with all different people. She usually had a white guitar, but I wanted to show the devilish side of her by making it red. Her guitar had horns to begin with. It was a 1960 Les Paul custom. They only made this one year, then they changed the name to SG.
Artist Statement
My recent work consists of larger-than-life ceramic busts; satirically depicting the general nature and eccentricities of my subjects. Humor plays an integral part in the physiological makeup of each character. The use of bold, vivid color and the exaggerated gestures also add a dimension in creating the personality and mood of the busts/characters.
-- Tony Natsoulas
Bio
Tony Natsoulas has been working as a professional artist specializing in ceramic sculpture since receiving his Masters of Fine Art degree in 1985 at the University of California, Davis. His main interest has been large-scale figurative ceramic sculpture with a flair for camp. In undergraduate and graduate school, Natsoulas was fortunate to have studied with world-renowned UC-Davis funk art professor Robert Arneson. Natsoulas’ pieces are in galleries and museums around the world. His commissioned work includes several public and private sculptures in bronze, fiberglass and ceramic. Natsoulas maintains a studio in Sacramento, CA.