CLAYMATION SPHINX, CENTAUR, AND... CREATURE
1968-1970. Three plasticine models, 12-20 cm tall, used for animated short films, by Chris Wayan.
By age 12, I was already obsessed with mythological figures. Not an intellectual obsession: I'd call it a sexual orientation. I looked passively at a few of my classmates who seemed attractive, but I never expected to date any of them--they were human. Another species. Instead, I shaped these figures alone at night--images of MY species. Sculpting them felt as intimate as making love, and it turned me on. And yet it wasn't just fetishism either: I worshiped them in some strange way. Sex, mythology and spirituality all fused and focused on these small, crude figures.
The centaur is the oldest of these three, begun when I was 14 I think. She had an elder sister, a graceful green-gold unicorn I was in love with; but no scannable photos survive. Since these figures were plasticine (oil-based clay that never hardens) they could be animated with caution and patience; but even with pipe-cleaners for a skeleton, the centauress (with so much weight on such long, relatively slender legs) was prone to sagging and cracking. There's a reason most claymation is squat and lumpish; tall slender figures sag under the heat of the photofloods! This is the only scannable shot I have, and it's late in her acting career, when she's suffering middle-age spread worse than Elvis's. When I shaped her, she was graceful, but too fragile for long life. But then, I had no thought of claymation--my only intent was worship/sex/identification... whatever it is mystics do.
But the Sphinx, a year later, was made with claymation in mind. Yet as I lovingly smoothed her breasts and sleeked her flanks and shaped her hind legs, (so much sexier than knobbly human legs), and carefully gave her a delicate slit under that long tail, and then turned to the fine details of her face... I found myself all excited again. I was in love with her cool feline hauteur.
She starred in a six-minute epic (on Super-8 film, not video, so I haven't seen it in decades) called "Oedipus and the Sphinx" in which the two fell in love instead of wasting their time on deadly riddle-games--or kingship.
It was my prayer for myself. Not granted.
Yet.
It's still my prayer. I'm stubborn that way.
This spooky little afterthought, done at 16, wasn't made for animation really; a first attempt at real sculpture, at catching a character without motion--but using this familiar, ephemeral medium. This shy forest creature was inspired by Tove Jansson's "Moomintroll" books.
And the medium was ephemeral: all these, and a dozen more, were crushed when a storage box fell on them a quarter-century ago.
LISTS AND LINKS: sculpture - a psychic dream the night the claymates died: Bye-Bye, Old Film - centaurs - sphinxes - the Tove Jansson figure's sculptural child - sexy creatures - dreams of being other species - precocity - juvenilia
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