Clay nation

Instead of working for the man, artist makes ‘Guys’ who work for her

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Nov 20, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

KATIE HARTLEY / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Meredith Dittmar, who has no formal art-school background, picked up sculpting with polymer clay after working in Web design. Even so, her creatures are as at home in art galleries as they are in commercial animation.

When Meredith Dittmar gets to work she goes into the zone.

The 33-year-old artist’s medium of choice is Premo, a brand of polymer clay that sculpts just like Play-Doh but that bakes rock hard in a conventional oven.

In her basement studio in the Hawthorne area, Dittmar works almost unconsciously when she pulls off a blob of the brightly colored clay. Her stock in trade is making what she calls My Guys: bizarre characters, pocket monsters and strange creatures, each original.

Some have the big-eyed look of Japanese anime characters; some have the fairy-tale feel of unicorns or elves. All this would be just another basement artist tale but for three things.

Dittmar has no day job — she makes a living off her Guys.

She is a respected artist nationally in the alternative clay scene and has gallery representation in Portland.

She is crossing over into the grown-up worlds of animation and character design.

Dittmar’s workbench holds neat rows of blocks of clay. She mixes her own colors and conditions the clay by running it through a hand-cranked pasta machine, and finally cooks the creatures in a dedicated oven in her backyard.

She can manufacture — with the accent on the “manu” — one character every 15 minutes, then sells them on her Web site, www.corporatepig.com/myguys, for $12 to $18 and for auction on eBay.

On eBay her pieces are snapped up by a few collectors — one recently went for $120 — something she compares it to the Beanie Baby phenomenon. On the one hand, it’s steady money; on the other, it’s artistically limited.

“I never throw any of them away,” Dittmar says of the Guys. “I learned that years ago selling at a craft market in Huntington Beach in Los Angeles.

“One time I made this horrendous giant chicken, it was awful. I was like, ‘Why did I make that?’ But some dude in a suit rushing to work saw it out of the corner of his eye and shouted, ‘How much is the chicken?’ I said, ‘Forty bucks?’ and he threw the money down and took it. The lesson is, I’m making it for somebody.”

More recently, Dittmar has pushed herself and the medium by creating small tableaux that place her creatures in a context. For instance, in “The Evolution of Psychepolymereganics,” her show at Portland’s Compound Gallery in October, one piece called “Homeward” shows a long-legged female animal with protective white owls on each hand and a crown of imagery above her head, representing her energy flowing outward.

In a companion piece, “Inward,” she has a bubble of swirling emotions over her head and the owls have taken off, one tearing her arm off in the process. As art it’s part Tibetan Buddhism, part Tim Burton.

“If there’s a narrative it’s the journey of understanding herself,” Dittmar says. “That’s mainly what my art work is about.”

Unconventional path led here

As a film editor at animation house Laika Entertainment, Margaret Andres sees plenty of art toys and animation characters.

She owns about 30 of the Guys and has given many more away as gifts.

“I love Meredith’s aesthetic,” Andres says. “The design is simple, yet her characters are so expressive, they’re all unique.” She also owns three of the tableaux.

Aside from being a fine colorist, Dittmar brings careful design and frequent, but not total, use of symmetry to the tableaux. They can feel like a pop version of William Blake’s cosmic imagery as she lays out worlds in which everything struggles to remain in balance.

“I love mandalas,” the artist says. “And I grew up painting Ukrainian Easter eggs,” which feature repeating patterns. Now she buys blown ostrich eggs online for $7 each to paint.

Dittmar never went to art school. She was raised in Boston and studied computer science in college, encouraged by her father, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After college she moved west, doing Web design in the summer and snowboarding in places such as Lake Tahoe.

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