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I am pleased to share a new collaboration between Critical Eye Finds and Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC: an online viewing room titled ABOUT LOOKING. For this first "Episode" in what is planned as an ongoing series, I was invited to share some thoughts about looking (and finding), and to consider a selection of late 19th/early 20th century drawings by Carlotta M. Huse of Ossipee, New Hampshire and Wayne B. Blouch of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, which we chose together. To visit the online viewing room featuring my essay along with images of all of the works, click here. The drawings are listed for sale individually here at Critical Eye Finds...

My favorite thing at flea markets is digging through tubs filled with a mish mosh of little odds and ends. And my favorite thing at estate sales is poking through desk drawers and piles…you just never know what little treasure you might find. For most dealers, the sorts of little curiosities I love most are too small to mess with—not enough profit in them to be worth the time, especially not if selling things online, where the time and cost of listing and packaging might outweigh the value of the thing itself. But I don’t care! Oftentimes it is the...

When I come home with a load from an estate sale, flea market, or a day out thrifting or antiquing, the first thing I do, after unpacking and inventorying my finds, is to start researching. Happily, my ability to recognize generally what things are (what they are made of, where they are from, how old they are, etc) is growing, but a lot of times I really have no real idea! When buying, I’m more driven by curiosity and informed by intuition than consumed by what something's worth, and pretty much only buy things I will be happy to keep...

I go to a fair number of estate sales in search of finds, which in the cold winter months requires extra fortitude! When I moved back east from Kansas City a few years ago, I discovered a whole new set of estate sale rules and procedures than I had encountered previously. At most sales here, a list can be started at the midnight proceeding the sale, to which people can add their names up until about 7 am, when the estate sale company arrives to distribute numbers to all present, corresponding to their place on the list. Everyone then disperses...