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JE owns a wonderful 1900s vintage Japanese necklace composed of faces of benevolent gods. The links are porcelain on sterling. The faces, and the gods they belong to, are important …

Imagine a clock that winds itself based on changes in atmospheric pressure. This Atmos clock doesn’t need a human. It winds itself with the help of a sealed bellows of …

Frightening yet beautiful, this wooden and polychromed (painted with many colors) carved Bapende mask from Zaire belongs to a group collected by a world-famous celebrity. The current owner asked, “Where …

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), an American Quaker master of the fantastic, created a commercial style also recognized as fine art. Known as a book and magazine illustrator in great demand, an …

At the Boys & Girls Club, my favorite thrift store in Ventura, I found an ugly Brutalist folk art style wood carving. This one-legged man sits with a cane. For …

My Montecito artist friend, AWS, experienced the phenomena we call “artist block.” He taught a class to a local Arts Association about ways to overcome “creative block.” He called last …

KMcD sent me a photo of four African masks purchased in Tanzania and Kenya, originally from Zaire, the Congo. I love these masks because I spent two years in upper …

At age twenty I worked as a dancer in Michigan with a touring company of Showboat. I loved the Grand Rapids area. One day off in the late 1970s I …

In many collections of American portraits of young children from the 1830-70s we ‘moderns’ cannot distinguish the genders of the sitters. SC sent me a little portrait of a child …

In 3300 BCE, Otzi the iceman was murdered high on a mountain between Italy and Austria then buried in a glacier until 1991. At the time of the murder diverse …