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Once upon a time, all art was about nature, the simplification or elaboration of natural forms. Egyptians assembled leaves of the thinnest gold and molded fruit in vividly colored glass into necklaces and diadems. Ancient Greeks fashioned ears of wheat from beaten and chased gold. Islamic prohibitions against showing the human face have led to highly developed and abstracted plant imagery, and in Japan Nature herself is sanctified.... (2001) Complete Story
For more than 20 years Judith Hoyt has parsed the human figure in metal and mixed media. Beginning with a salvaged scrap of metal, wood, a book, or other material with a history, she fashions solitary or paired figures, often with a surprised or pensive mien, She is a metallist to the extent that fabricated metal forms provide a ghostly surface on which opaque paint is sparingly applied..... (2004) Complete Story
Silver has been a part of American domestic ritual and tradition since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when bourgeois families used coffee and tea services, serving utensils, and other silver domestic objects in imitation of their English Counterparts. A robust American silver design and manufacturing industry gross a, people of means were no longer satisfied to live with homemade utensils and furnishings, and fine craftsmen became a part of the social-culturaleconomic nexus. The wealthy had sterling silver gravy hosts, porringers, and crumb trays, and the middle classes had silverplated items of similar design. Even the big silver designers such as Gorham and Tiffany created whimsical and ornate holloware and utensils according to the prevailing design motifs of the time. Commercially available modernist pitchers from the 1930s seem close cousins of Muir's vessels.... (2004) Complete Story