Sometimes, success keeps strange company. Burlington artist Gretchen Verplanck found it amid a horde of cheeky monsters.
In July 2024, Verplanck and staffers at Frog Hollow Vermont Craft Gallery in Burlington waded through a sea of boxes to unpack 75 ceramic monsters she had made. The artist initially booked for that month’s gallery show had dropped out, and Verplanck, then 54, was a last-minute sub. The invitation was a nice boost to her fledgling art career. But she had no idea that she was about to unleash a frenzy.
Twenty years after giving up on a ceramics career, Verplanck had recommitted to the art four years earlier. She had cleaned out her garage studio and begun making intricate boxes with animals perched on the lids, vases shaped like people, and octopi candleholders, which Frog Hollow couldn’t keep in stock.
“They just feel like they have kind souls.”
Dan Siegel
She hadn’t yet exhibited the monsters anywhere. That day at Frog Hollow, they emerged from the boxes one after another, sporting polka dots, hats, golden horns, hairy bodies, cheeky grins, wry smiles, and varying numbers of teeth or fangs. Customers were smitten. They started buying pieces as Verplanck was unpacking them. “This is going to be big, Gretchen,” then-gallery director Daniel Zeese told her.
So many monsters got snapped up ahead of the show’s opening reception that Zeese suggested she go home and make more. “And I was like, Oh, my god, did I figure something out?” she recalled.
Finally, after leaving her art career; raising two kids; and working as a caterer, color consultant, bookkeeper, sandblaster, and server slinging pizza and beer, Verplanck, always an artist at heart, had found professional validation. “There is a market for me in what I want to do,” she said. “I just had to find it.”
Since that day, she has sold 700 of her “Scary Monsters.” Her Big Girl Company — husband Nat Woodard is her sole employee — has shipped monsters across the U.S. and to Canada, the UK and Germany. Each comes with a name, a bio and Verplanck’s hand-drawn doodles on the shipping box. No two monsters are alike.
While Verplanck tries to keep a few at two local galleries — Thirty-odd in Burlington and Front Four Gallery in Stowe — she sells mostly online, where she aims to offer monthly drops or lotteries of new collections. Three thousand people visited her website for her September drop, when 50 monsters sold in two minutes.
The audacious ogres celebrate humanity in all of its shapes, sizes and moods. All are lovable when rendered by Verplanck. She gives each monster a unique personality, which may be generous, goofy, quirky or extremely annoying. Regardless, said Burlington potter Dan Siegel, “They just feel like they have kind souls.”
Verplanck has disarmed dreadful and made it endearing. “Bruce” is a toadish, gossipy community theater director conversant in dramas on and off the stage. Sleepy-eyed “Carson” likes to smoke weed and pretend he’s not from a rich family. Wide-eyed, four-armed “Tina” is a hot mess and an excessively cheerful close talker. Meanwhile, “Maria,” matriarch of a large family, exhibits unmatched skill for multitasking — and micromanaging — and the minimally designed “Carla” Marie Kondo-ed her house and binge-watches “Real Housewives.”
Each monster starts as a hollow clay cylinder. Verplanck works quickly and without a plan. She cuts the legs, forms the crotch, builds the feet and then assembles the rest of the body. If a creature wears pajamas and bunny slippers, she knits a blanket to tuck under its arm. Monsters in flip-flops might tote a terry cloth beach towel or wear a ceramic starfish splayed atop their head.
Each appears effortlessly made, “like it was just born into existence,” Siegel said. “That shows a really great deal of mastery.”
Most monsters stand squarely on two feet, facing the world head-on as if to say, Here I am — warts, claws, horns and all.
Verplanck exhibits the same unapologetic authenticity. She once created a series of “oversharing plates,” covered with pictures and tiny text detailing her life’s most embarrassing moments. She wears colorful overalls festooned with flowers and paints her fingernails chartreuse and teal. Her hair is “Twisted Plum,” a reddish-purple color she calls “Old Lady Montréal.” If not tamed into a ponytail, it tumbles to her shoulders, as if one of those birds’ nests she likes to perch on a monster head exploded in the kiln.
She posts videos on multiple social media platforms several times a week, which is undoubtedly a key to her success — she has 118,000 followers between TikTok and Instagram. Viewers can watch her work, meet monsters in various stages of production, look over her shoulder as she lifts the lid of her kiln — “I’m living for these kiln reveals,” one gushed — and hear her confessions.
“Look at me, I’m all hot and sweaty,” she said one August morning in a video that showed her sitting on her couch, sans makeup, next to her dog, Migs. She thanked everyone who had shown up online for her drop the previous day and empathized with people who didn’t get a monster. She takes on the frustration and disappointment they share with her, she said, as the video took on a therapy vibe: “I’m trying to have a little bit of a boundary,” Verplanck said, “but I haven’t gotten there yet.”
Monster prices vary depending on size, detail and the amount of gold — real gold — that adorns their horns, claws and an occasional tooth. Generally, they range from $100 for the smallest ones to $2,000 for those 12 to 14 inches tall. She has begun offering a few in online auctions. “Geoffrey,” a 10-inch-tall, eye-rolling egomaniac wearing a crown, went for a record $5,678 this month.
For Verplanck, who grew up middle-class and has lived paycheck-to-paycheck most of her adult life, accepting that much money for her work has been a philosophical challenge.
“My old self would not have been able to afford a piece,” she told me. From the start, people told her that she needed to charge more. Her monsters are labor-intensive. From sculpting, drying, blackwashing, glazing, decorating, naming and writing backstories, they take days to complete. Most get fired three times. “It’s OK to make enough money to potentially have a retirement account,” she has realized. Still: “I want people who don’t have a lot of money to be able to get something that they feel happy about.”
Verplanck grew up in Wickford, R.I., the daughter of a fishmonger and a nanny turned Chamber of Commerce exec. Her parents split when she was a teen. After underwhelming high school art classes — “I basically was given books and pencils to draw with,” she said — she enrolled at Rhode Island College in 1988, when she was 17. She went to one class, worked at a restaurant, partied and dropped out.
The next semester, to avoid moving home, she enrolled at Goddard College, the only school still accepting applications. “I wanted to do art, and I wanted to go to nightclubs and work in restaurants and drink and snort cocaine,” she said. But she settled in and met her future husband, Woodard, the son of an instructor, and pottery teacher Charlotte Potok, who introduced her to clay. She loved the medium and worked hard, but Goddard was tiny. Recognizing Verplanck’s talent, Potok pointed her to the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, the premier ceramics institution in the country.
Verplanck completed her junior and senior years there. “I had humongous studios, a tile teacher, a throwing teacher, a ceramic-sculpture teacher,” she said, but no one taught “how to sell your work when you get out or even how to pack your work.”
Still, she tried to make a go of it. After college, she and Woodard moved to Burlington, where she shared studio space with other potters. “Their stuff was selling, but mine was not,” Verplanck said. People wanted mugs and vases, “and I was making tattoo plates or polka-dot punch bowls.”
She found some success exhibiting at shows for emerging artists but had to fight the art-world bias that dismisses ceramics as craft, not fine art.
Disappointments mounted. After six years, she stopped pursuing an art career. She kept the studio she had set up in her detached garage, but it gradually filled with junk. “I just fumbled around for a really long time,” she said. Most recently, she worked as a server at American Flatbread in Burlington, where she built the elaborate tile mural at the host stand.
About six years ago, she visited Siegel’s studio and left feeling jealous of his career. What am I doing? she asked herself. I really want that.
She emptied the garage, painted it, and installed a new floor and window. Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, freeing Verplanck from her job at Flatbread, supplying unemployment income and erasing her excuses. And she started sculpting again. She went back to work at Flatbread for a stint, but since early 2024, she has been making art full time.
Casting about for things to make in January of that year, she eyed a monster head hanging on her studio wall. She’d made it years earlier and hadn’t even glazed it. She’d just stuck it on a plaque, like a deer trophy. I should figure that out, she thought.
She soon found herself surrounded by monsters.
“I was making all this work — and really excited about it — with absolutely no idea what I was gonna do with it at all,” she said. “It was piling up.” But the characters intrigued her, and she felt compelled to keep exploring.
She planned to exhibit at the South End Art Hop that fall, but in the meantime, Frog Hollow called. She had to make a whole new show for Art Hop.
Monsters now generate enough income to support Verplanck and her husband. Even if they weren’t selling, she said, she’d still be making them because she wants to explore people’s relationships to their demons and monsters’ relationships to each other. She completes about seven each week. More, she said, “want to come out.”
And people can’t wait to meet them. The kiln reveal she posted on TikTok last week got 1 million views. Her September video introducing “Bobby” and “Garrett,” two monsters wearing Halloween costumes, sparked similar enthusiasm. “I want both of them!!!” one fan replied. “I’d even sell my kidney.”
Aware of those disappointed fans unable to buy a monster, a follower named Mike in Massachusetts sent back one he had purchased and asked Verplanck to give it to someone who couldn’t afford one. He also paid $100 for a mini monster and asked Verplanck to give it away. “That’s the kind of people I want to be friends with,” she said. “I am not an angel. I am a judgy, snarky person,” she clarified. But, “I love that people are kind to each other when it really counts.”
Some artists seek to make grand statements with their work, she said, but “I’m not trying to say anything about anything other than just: Lighten up.”
California collector Amy Rambacher owns 10 monsters, including “Geoffrey.” “With all the crazy stuff going on in the world, I like to surround myself with art that cheers me up and reminds me that there’s still good, beauty and humor around us,” she said. The monsters line a shelf in her living room.
Verplanck misses them when they’re gone. She hasn’t kept a single one.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Monster Smash | Burlington ceramic artist Gretchen Verplanck has found success with her wildly popular ‘Scary Monsters'”
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4 2025.
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