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<a href="https://vimeo.com/675671114">Tony Natsoulas at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user122517837">Sonoma Valley Museum of Art</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.



Check out this video about how Tony Natsoulas honoured his friend and fellow ceramic artist Clayton Bailey (1939-2020) in a one of a kind exhibition back in 2021. I can't think of a more beautiful way to honour a friend! Find out more about Clayton's inspiring life on his <a href="https://www.instagram.com/claytonbaileyart" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">instagram</a>. 







<h2>Video Transcript</h2>



So this show at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art came about because Clayton had suffered a stroke and he was not, he was very depressed and so we would go and visit him once a week and I thought that just to make him feel a little happier I would apply to the Sonoma Valley Museum and they had said yes. It was great,a two person show in 2020. Of course,with COVID we actually had to postpone it to 2021 which was really unfortunate because Clayton passed away in 2020. We're going to have the show anyway. I wanted to honor Clayton Bailey by doing the show by doing the sculptures that I did this whole entire year. I did a portrait of him of course. What my idea was in honoring Clayton was to build sculptures that had to do with him and what his interests were. So I did three artists and I did Clayton. I did a sculpture of Alexander Calder who I just thought was wonderful. He was so inventive and Clayton was so inventive. I thought that went together. The other sculpture that I did to honor Clayton was a sculpture of Keith Haring which I thought was,I think Keith Haring was very inventive and very succinct. The second part of the honoring of Clayton is I wanted to do some inventors and so I did a sculpture of Rube Goldberg even though Rube Goldberg is,you know,he's an artist but he invented all these fantasy machines on how to make something,some event as difficult as possible,some task as difficult as possible. Clayton also was a musician so I wanted to honor that part of his work. So I did a sculpture of Annie Lennox and she has been my hero for years too. She was in the Eurythmics in the 1980s and she has since had an incredible solo career. She's won all kinds of awards and she's also an amazing activist which I just think is wonderful. She has a organization called The Circle and the neon circle represents that. And then in her dress I made it look kind of like the Coliseum in that there's all these I guess they're not doorways but there's all these cubbies where I stuck all the pieces that I thought were important parts of her life. I did the sculpture of Clayton and I decided to of course put him in a pith helmet because he,his altered ego was named Dr. Gladstone and Dr. Gladstone was an archaeologist who dug up all kinds of bones,Bigfoot bones, Cyclops bones,he was amazing. So he's got a pith helmet on,he's got a bone that he dug up and he also,his body is made up of a big boiler because he also did a lot of robots that he built from different objects like coolers and ovens and all kinds of different things. And so I thought a boiler would be great cause he was such a wonderful guy you know,very warm like a boiler would I mean,like a boiler would be. Warm hearted that is. And funnier in hell. So I got this,I got a picture of a boiler and I made that and then I also had the door open at his chest and I found this light bulb online that flickers like a candle would and so I put that in there and it looks like the boiler is hot. And then what I did is it just didn't seem like it was going to be tall enough, so what I did is I made a flying saucer underneath him and I thought how can I make this flying saucer more interesting so I covered it with these little marbles,the little flattened marbles and that didn't do much,so I had my friend Tim Laser blow some glass cups and so I put those in the windows and covered those with more flattened marbles and then I found online these little disco balls and put those in the windows of the flying saucer. Now Clayton loved flying saucers,loved ray guns,loved that whole thing so then I had someone make me a base like kind of a flying saucer base might be. He also collected a ton of ray guns and he had bunches of them,so I have ray gun in his hand with a little zap on the end of it. So these pieces I did,I'm very happy with. I feel like I made another step in a direction that I wanted to be in the past. I haven't really been very happy with a lot of my work and these I'm pretty happy with all of them,which is really amazing. I think the big step is that I've actually honed more in on the people's lives and their personalities. The other pieces I sort of just made sculptures of them and these I think are talking more about them and their lives so it's a little more compact about the person. The Picasso piece I like a lot,but it was just about the idea of fine art versus craft whereas the Annie Lennox piece really has to do with her and her activism and her being a mother and being just an amazing person all round. The same thing with the Rube Goldberg piece,each piece is about his life,and I really like that idea of trying to show people,not just on the surface,this is a portrait of them. I want to say this is a portrait of them and the things they've done and who they are.







<h2>Clayton Bailey</h2>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://staging.ceramic.school/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-19-at-2.54.51-PM.png"><img src="https://staging.ceramic.school/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-19-at-2.54.51-PM-1024x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-98114" /></a><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Tony's sculpture of friend and artist Clayton Bailey. </figcaption></figure>







<h2>Annie Lennox</h2>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://staging.ceramic.school/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-19-at-2.55.15-PM.png"><img src="https://staging.ceramic.school/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-07-19-at-2.55.15-PM-963x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-98115" /></a><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Annie Lennox as portrayed by Tony.</figcaption></figure>



<a href="https://www.instagram.com/tonynatsoulas/?hl=en">Follow Tony on Instagram</a> for more info about his work and this fabulous exhibition. 











Discover thousands of other artists,exhibits,galleries and more in <a href="https://staging.ceramic.school/directory/">our online ceramics directory</a>!

Tony Natsoulas at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art

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Tony Natsoulas at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art

Tony Natsoulas at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art

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