Lot 183C

Larry E. Carnes Ceramic Sculpture - Three Stacked Spirit Horses

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Lot 183
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Larry E. Carnes Ceramic Sculpture - Three Stacked Spirit Horses
Larry E. Carnes Ceramic Sculpture - Three Stacked Spirit Horses
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Larry E. Carnes Ceramic Sculpture - Three Stacked Spirit Horses

Estimate: $1,000 - $1,500

Starting Bid: $500

(0 Bids)
by Artemis Fine Arts
August 6, 2026 9:00 AM MDT
Live Auction
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

Larry E. Carnes (American / Native American, active XX to XXI century). Three stacked horses with body paint. Pottery sculpture, n.d. Signed with artist's stamp on proper left hind leg of bottom horse. A tower of three horses rises one atop another, each animal balanced on the back of the one below in a composition that is equal parts acrobatic feat and quiet conversation. The unglazed earthenware carries a warm, dusky terracotta surface, its skin textured like weathered stone, and each horse turns its long neck as if aware of its neighbors, ears pricked, muzzles nearly touching. White handprints, spirals, starbursts, and a zigzag lightning motif are painted across their flanks and necks, drawn from petroglyph and rock-art vocabularies. These are spirit horses rather than portraits of living animals, their rounded bellies and stubby legs lending a gentle, almost comic tenderness. The stacking transforms three separate creatures into a single ascending gesture, playful and totemic at once, a sculpture that rewards walking around it. Size: 9.5" W x 30" H x 17" D (24.1 cm W x 76.2 cm H x 43.2 cm D).

About the artist: Larry Carnes works clay the way a sculptor works stone that already contains its form, favoring the sphere as his organizing shape and the starburst as his signature mark. Every piece stamped with that starburst carries the same conviction: that a circle, more than any other geometry, holds the shape of a life fully lived.

Carnes trained at Chouinard Art Institute, where his coursework in cartooning, animation, and industrial design gave him a graphic eye unusual among studio potters, and he holds a graduate degree from Illinois State University. That academic grounding met a different kind of education under Otto Heino, the Ojai based ceramicist whose glazes and forms command prices in the thousands and whose reputation as one of the twentieth century's defining American studio potters is well documented. Working alongside Heino gave Carnes both a technical vocabulary and a standard to measure himself against. He put that technical fluency to industrial use as well, serving around 1997 as a technical specialist to major California clay manufacturers including Gladding McBean, work that sits at some distance from studio artistry but sharpened his command of materials and firing.

Carnes now works from a home studio in Palo Cedro, in the far north of the state, while showing primarily out of Ojai and in galleries across California, a geography that puts roughly the length of the state between his kiln and his audience. His Native American heritage shapes a recurring body of work: a series exploring shamanic imagery, spirit horses, and other figures drawn from the natural world. Among these, his Chumash Stones, begun in 2008, translate the petroglyph imagery found in the caves around Ojai into ceramic form, made with the stated approval of a Chumash elder to use the symbols. He extends the theme with grouped stone assemblies and figures he calls Keepers of the Stones, and with Kiln Gods, small guardian figures, generally under five inches, that he makes anew each time he loads a kiln. Made once and never repeated, each Kiln God functions less as product than as talisman, and collectors prize them precisely because no two exist. Alongside this symbolic work runs a more conventional studio practice: vases, bowls, cups, rice bowl sets, and wall pieces that show the same formal discipline without the ceremonial weight.

Provenance: private Denver, Colorado, USA collection; ex-Trautenberg Estate

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Item # 204072

  • Condition: Intact and in excellent overall condition. Signed with artist's stamp on proper left hind leg of bottom horse.

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Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $299 $25
$300 $999 $50
$1,000 $1,999 $100
$2,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $199,999 $10,000
$200,000 + $20,000