Featured Artist:  Cha Cha Hertz

I’ve been working with Clay Shay for several years. (In earnest since Covid)

I make my armatures out of metal, which I design, hand cut out of steel with a plasma cutter, mig welded and then I cover it with aluminum foil (to get the base shape)and add the Clay Shay, prime it, then paint. What I like about making the metal armatures is that it allows me to defy gravity with the birds standing sometimes on just one leg.

Here are several photos of the processes and some of the finished art pieces.

I’ve been an artist in my entire working life (and before) working in multiple mediums.

– ChaCha

Birds have always been in my life as long as I can remember. My grandfather and father hunted wild birds, and my grandmother made friends and fed them. She had everything from peacocks to parakeets. My interpretation of birds are all fantasy birds in my head. I draw them, name them, and then make them. Some are made out of porcelain or air-dried clay on a steel armature, a technique I made up during Covid. I was able to make my studio world into a world of birds.

I first got turned onto ClayShay through a Boulder artist named Pat Chapman. I always loved her multi medium sculptures and when she offered to teach, I jumped at the opportunity. I took a workshop with her and fell in love with it because it gave me so many more creative options. For the few years before my introduction to ClayShay, I had been working with porcelain, building my birds out of clay, firing and glazing them, and then I would take them to my metal shop and forge and create metal legs for each bird. Each bird became an engineering project that was a pain in the butt! Sometimes I had to walk away from a bird (because it stopped squawking to me about what it wanted) for a period of time before I could figure out their legs! 

THEN COVID ARRIVED……

& once we all became sequestered, I had to reinvent myself (besides, that’s what Artists do) because I could not go to the shared clay studio and keep creating them. 

That’s when I had the grand idea of making the armatures out of handcut and welded steel, covering them with aluminum foil (to get their general shape), then adding the Clay Shay, which I then primed and painted. The nice thing about the armature being welded is that I now had a base that the bird could stand up on, sometimes on one leg, so it could defy gravity, which is something I could not do with porcelain. And for the last few years, my birds keep getting bigger and bigger.

I also use the ClayShay on the heads of some of the snakes that I make. Let me explain, I like to kayak and paddleboard all summer in Colorado. When I’m on the lakes, I often find sticks that look like snakes floating in the water. I bring them to my studio where I shape their heads and trim down the tails. Sometimes the shape that I want the head to be on the snake is not what I’m envisioning, so I add Clay Shay to some of them which give them a lot more personality. I’ll also include a wall of snakes photo from the studio gallery I have. And yes, there are snakes, twirling around the ceiling – This is what I do for fun.
Best –
Cha Cha Hertz
@chachamakesart