(lilting guitar music) - To me, my pieces are three-dimensional canvases.

It's very fun to have these creature people.

I think of them as ecosystems of all kinds of creatures coming together, making a bigger being, much like nature is.

My name is Jef Raasch, and I'm a ceramics sculptor.

Ever since I was a little kid, that was the thing that I really excelled at, is working with clay, it was plasticine back when I was a little kid.

And I would just remember it was in 5th grade I made a plasticine pig, and it was the best in the class.

And so, that's where I got my start.

(gentle string music) My work with clay involves building hollow forms.

And so, I construct the pieces with about an inch or half-inch thickness, all the way around, depending on how big they are.

I really try to keep that about the same.

Gets too thick, things happen, pieces crack.

So that, you know, each piece is built hollow, like a pot.

I think if was going to make just pieces that I want to make, they would be all life-size human sculptures.

But I do try to supply different sizes for everybody else so the average person can take a piece home with them.

Variety is the spice of life.

(chuckles) For a long time, I was stacking animals, just making sculptures of stacked animals.

And I always wanted to work with the human form, but I wasn't sure exactly, you know, if I started stacking human forms, it might get kind of grisly.

And so, one day it clicked that, heck, I could make human forms by stacking animals.

And that's what I did.

(enigmatic music) When I start a piece, I work from photographs of, say, a human form, and I have images of that person in pose from 360 degrees.

So, images all the way around.

And I make sure, I blow them up on my walls, and I use a calipers to get the measurements right, proportions right.

And so that's where I start, is getting the human form correctly proportioned.

It's difficult.

It's something that if it's wrong, it's wrong, very obvious to people that the anatomy is wrong.

You can fudge with animals, people just don't know, you know, they don't pay as much attention.

And so, you have to do things with the human form to get it right.

And if it isn't, at least to me, and I think I'm more picky because it's my work, but it needs to feel right.

And then I sit back and think, "Well, what kind of an animal would fit "in this muscle group to make this feel right?"

And so, then that kind of evolves, and I don't know exactly what it's gonna be until it happens.

Recently, my pieces have been very earthy colors.

I use a lot of browns and greens and things that you can just find outdoors, or find it in your own backyard, my backyard.

But after awhile, I get a little bored, and then I will go back and add color.

My piece behind me here, you can see is very colorful.

And I have koi in my backyard.

And so it's fun to change it up and add lots of color.

I'm really, have always been drawn to nature.

As a little kid, I would wander in the woods, catch creatures, just enjoy exploring and that stuff.

And it's just something that always kind of a longing for to go back to.

And so, I find using nature in my work now is something that I can draw on and just continually explore nature and go from there.

(effervescent music) I have a product called Wall Spots, and they are faces that have a lot of fun with creating different expressions.

And I like to have these groupings of faces, and have them interact with each other.

It's kind of, again, the ecosystem of thought, but this time it's more emotional relationships between people.

And my faces, which they're like little mini green men, and they again are taken from putting the human form and putting 'em back into nature.

And so, the leaf form is something that ya find in the wild, and merge that with the human form in conversations with each other.

Well, it's fun showing my pieces at art shows.

You get a variety of people coming through, and it's fun to look at people's expressions as they look at my pieces.

And quite often, they laugh, or, occasionally I've had people start crying in my booth over pieces.

I think people have emotional reactions to my work because I think there's a longing, especially as urban dwellers, to feel the earth, to give back to it, to find something simpler, more natural, instead of the busy, crazy life that we live in with cell phones and mechanical things.

It's an escape, it's a fantasy.

And it's a place that people want to plunge into.

(chuckles) I can't think of any other job that I'm qualified for than doing this.

This, there is no choice, this is where I have to be.

- [Announcer] Thanks for watching "The Arts Page."

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