Tony Natsoulas - "Dr. Gladstone has left the Planet (Portrait of Clayton Bailey)"
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.