Rago Arts & Auctions recently updated and enhanced their website, offering a more complete catalog of available "passed lots" – items not sold at previous auctions – as well as memorable highlights from recent auctions. Some amazing stuff, there; kind of neat to see price records for really excellent examples.
The most recent Early 20th Auction was this past Friday, October 1 2010. Some highlights are pictured above.
If you’re anywhere in the general region, it would be worth your while to visit the Bauer Pottery Sale’s warehouse sale today at 3051 Rosslyn Street in Los Angeles (right next door to Forest Lawn cemetery). Julie Makinen of the Los Angeles Times has more on the sale and this important piece of California’s Arts & Crafts legacy.
My wife recently gave me a beautiful house number plaque from Ravenstone tiles in their very nice Ginkgo design. It looks terrific mounted on our stucco home, and I definitely recommend them. In fact, all of Ravenstone’s stuff is especially pretty, and they’re very much dedicated to the Arts & Crafts movement – much of their new stock is influenced either by pre-Raphaelite / English A&C or the Japanese / US Craftsman aesthetic.
Another company making similar tiles, although a bit more regular and without the charming softness / handmade quality of the Ravenstone pieces, is Rocheford Handmade Tile in Minneapolis. Their Craftsman line includes not only numbers in several type styles, but a bunch of nice odds & ends that make great trim or borders for the numbers. I don’t think they offer custom pieces the way Ravenstone does, but if you want a more regular, angular look, you might want to check them out.
Husband and wife Blaine and Laura Avery are ceramic artists in Seagrove, North Carolina, just 45 minutes south of Greensboro. Strongly influenced by the Arts & Crafts Movement and the organic forms of Art Nouveau, their urns, plates and teapots are reminiscent of the shapes of Grueby and Roseville. Both potters frequently rely on both natural clay tones and the blues and greens so popular in A & C; the colors are especially vivid in their tile work.
Their shop is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm, and they have regular kiln openings each spring and fall.
Sacramento’s Panama Pottery has been producing simple, Arts & Crafts inspired decorative pottery and a huge range of plain old terracotta (in dozens of shapes and sizes) for many generations. My friend Michael Kressner recently visited their shop and took some terrific photographs:
In addition to many lovely vases & various ceramic lamps, Seattle’s Craftsman Studios also sells this very pretty, hand-painted and certainly unique ceramic mantel clock for $150.
Craftsman Studios is the name of ceramicist Dean Hudgin’s labor of love. His work is sold directly, as well as through The Antique Lighting Company in Seattle and Oak Park Home & Hardware in Oak Park IL.
click on the image for a super-sized version
I’ve been getting lots of emails asking for more links to interesting items for sale – on Craigslist, Ebay, at auction or wherever. So this week and next I’ll be posting a lot more like this.
Today, pretty A&C tiles on Ebay – some in bulk, some in frames, some individually:
The firm of Gladding, McBean has produced materials for hundreds – and probably thousands – of beautiful historic homes here in California. The Greene brothers used their stuccoed planters at the Gamble House, and Bernard Maybeck used their roof tiles, chimney tops, planters and more in both his residential, civic and commercial projects. While it is now a division of Pacific Coast Building Products and no longer independently-owned, they are still making the clay and terra cotta items they’ve become known for since 1874. Today they are the only remaining maker of ornamental hand-made terra cotta in this country.
The company is still going strong today, producing those items and all sorts of architectural terra cotta work, fire flashed clay floor tiles, and a whole range of garden pottery. Their website has a number of photo galleries; their garden pottery, especially the big oil jars, are beautiful, as are the tiles and decorative chimney tops, the perfect finishing touch to any A & C home.
Booth Mountain Retreat is a family blog "about establishing a family homestead outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina." They "started with a two-story timber frame coach house and later will build an attached 1909 Gustav Stickley-designed main house." I enjoy their articles on various aspects of timber frame construction, but was especially struck by something last week – an account of the family’s visit to Cole Pottery in Sanford NC.
Whenever I head into Sanford I need to stop at Cole Pottery. It is just
before you get to Sanford and it is a great place. It is run by Neolia
and Celia Cole and Neolia’s grandson Kenneth George. Today Neolia and
Kenneth were there. It is an old building with dirt floors covered with
tar paper. The exterior is cover in vinyl siding and it is not showy.
They have a back room that they are usually throwing pots. Neolia will
usually have a cigarette going and Kenneth is quietly working.
Cole Pottery and its family owners was also the subject of New Life, a 55-minute documentary made by Jim Sharkey and distributed by folkfilms.com.
Slight hyperbole aside ("(t)he nation’s premier source of high-quality hand-made ceramic tiles" – you can’t fault them for being proud of their product!), Healdsburg’s McIntyre Tile Company does make some of the prettiest A&C tile available anywhere. This should come as no surprise since Bob McIntyre, the founder and CEO of the firm, started his career at Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, where the worlds of art ceramics and mass-produced commercial-grade products intersected.
Their 250 glaze colors come in simple primary palettes as well as more specialized series, including a line modeled after the colors of California’s own take on the Arts & Crafts movement. Their mosaic tiles come in a huge range of shapes and sizes, from 2" square all the way to 4" x 12" and 6" square sizes, one-cut corners, octagons and hexagons.