Wabaunsee ? Eric Abraham was 3 years old when his mother handed him his first slab of dime-store clay.

A lot has changed in the intervening 62 years.

Ceramic artist Eric Abraham sculpts a mirror frame in his Wabaunsee studio. Abraham is known for mixing fantasy and reality in his work, as diverse as miniature winged animals to ornate mirrors and bathroom lavatories.

“She nurtured my creative side,” says Abraham, at work in his old trailer-house-turned-art-studio, which sits close by the 19th-century wooden schoolhouse that is now his home in northeast Kansas.

Abraham now looks more like an off-season Santa, his round smiling face fully bearded, than the cherubic 6-year-old pictured in a photo album proudly showing off a set of clay figures he had made as a child.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is Abraham’s love for sculpting wild and wonderful things out of earth-based materials and producing one-of-a-kind ceramic works of art.

Flying pigs, cows, even winged armadillos sprout from his imagination.

Metallic glazed orbs, suspended like hat pins, hover over the scenes like rows of planets passing the sun.

“I like art nouveau, art deco … anything decorative that has a lot of flair to it. If it’s busy, there’s a lot happening in it, I like it,” says Abraham, an Air Force veteran, former Hallmark greeting cards artist and a one-time Kansas State University art instructor.

He comes by his artistic bent naturally: His parents were both artists who worked for the WPA during the Depression, illustrating children’s books for schools. His father also painted landscapes, and his mother went on to become a decorative furniture artist. Abraham grew up in Harlem in New York City.

Abraham has created everything from bizarre bathroom lavatory and mirror sets to personalized wedding cake toppers for his clients. He has built propane-powered fire-breathing yard dragons and decorative “chimney pots” that would look right at home atop a castle in a Dungeons & Dragons movie.

He said his stylistic approach is heavily influenced by his studies of European Baroque and Rococo period art of the 17th and 18th centuries.

“Life was not very pleasant back then, but you would go into a church or a palace full of these decorations and you left the real world behind for a while. It was like going into an amusement park,” Abraham says.

He has art degrees from the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Nebraska.

People often find Abraham’s art strange, but compelling. “There was a guy at a show I had near Vail who said, ‘This is the ugliest, most horrible stuff I’ve ever seen.’ But he kept coming back, and by the time he left, he said, ‘I have to have it,”‘ Abraham said.

His work was featured on a segment of the Lynette Jennings national cable television show. He says his strongest markets are along the East Coast and in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas.

He describes his artwork as having a sense of “other worldness” to it, and he thinks that’s a part of its appeal. “Everybody needs to escape the real world for a few minutes,” he said.

Abraham’s artwork is on display in the Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan.