A Bumpy Road

My husband and I have had the good fortune to have numerous Gila monster visits to our small yard. Although they are the only venomous lizards native to the U.S., they are far from aggressive, and we consider them welcome visitors because of their beauty and reclusive nature.

This lizard visited over a number years and was my "model."

The Gila monster’s bumps are bony structures fused onto the animal’s skull and embedded into the scales of its body. The striking color patterns warn other creatures to stay away.

Their thick tails are important for their survival: the fat stored there can sustain them for months or even years. So, they don't need to eat often but when they do, they might eat up to one third of their weight.

They rarely bite, generally only when people try to handle them. The venom is relatively mild and the number of human fatalities is minuscule. As a matter of fact, the venom was studied for medicinal qualities, and a synthetic version is now manufactured to treat type 2 diabetes. However, their bite is deemed one of the most painful in the world in large part because they clamp down and don't let go. Urban legend has it that sometimes the lizard is still attached when its assailant (from the lizard perspective) arrives at medical facility for treatment.

For my artwork I wanted the animal to appear to emerge into life from a two-dimensional painting.

The upper part of the piece is painted with acrylic ink on clayboard. As your eye moves from the farthest background at the top down to the middle ground, you see more and more detail that I added by scratching away ink with an X-acto knife and other sharp tools.

The foreground is sculpted in polymer clay with the depth of the third dimension reaching one and a quarter inch at the lizard's head.

That bumpy, colorful skin was an intriguing challenge. The roughly 2,000 bumps were formed and smoothed—one by one—into the clay of the body. I used colored clay, not paint, to create the patterns. The illusion required a precise match between the colors I mixed in both the ink for the background and clay for the foreground.

In this slideshow you can see how the piece came to life. (Click in the middle to enlarge; click the arrows at right and left center to advance or go back.)