Steve Lucas is one of the leading Hopi-Tewa potters working today.  Each piece is coil-built, stone polished, painted with native clay slips and bee-weed (black), and traditionally fired.  Steve has won “Best of Show” at Santa Fe Indian Market, and his work remains some of the most refined and creative.  This is one of the few plates Steve has made in the past decade. The plate is fully polished on the front and back and fully painted on the front.  The piece has 16 sections of design.  Steve said they each have stylized version of Hopi Katsina faces, it all depends which way you turn it!  The various shapes create their own “grid” and are joined by star pattern.  It is a complex and creative piece!  It is painted with bee-weed (black) and highlighted with polished red clays.  The Katsinas are meant to be representative and not literal in appearance.  Amazingly, Steve can use so many different colors of clay and the result is fluid but visually engaging.   The piece was traditionally fired and has a dramatic coloration from the firing.  It is signed on the bottom in the clay, “S. Lucas” and a mudhead (koyemsi) and an ear of corn (corn clan).  It is an innovative design in a classic form.  We had a museum mount made for the stand, which places it at the perfect angle!

“In my pottery the katsina masks are not exact representations of them but simply have elements of them in there. I would go and watch the dances, and I liked the way the katsinas looked so I began to put them on the pottery.  I try to mix the abstract and the classic design elements on the top to show how the two could be connected. I was always interested in looking at stars and finding inspiration there. Where I fire there are no streetlights. I can sit at night and see everything and watch a lot of stars.  Steve Lucas, Spoken Through Clay