This is a mug that is part of a series of seven rare mug forms that Brenda decorated with faces, except for one mug, which has a leaf pattern. The mugs are delicately cast. The diameter at the top lip is 2 inches. It is 3.5 inches tall and wide.

There is a small chip along one side of the lip and another hairline crack on the front side of the face with straight hair, but neither the chip nor the crack goes to the other side.

I speculate that this series was designed on commission. These mugs correspond with the time when the movie Carousel was filmed in Boothbay Harbor. During that time, numerous actors and others associated with the filming came by my parents’ ceramic gallery to have their portraits painted by my mother on the ceramic forms usually designed by my Dad.

However, the only part of this rare mug form that resembles my father’s sensibilities is the handle. So I believe that this mug was created as a commission, and the person commissioning the work dictated the design of the form.

The mugs are artifacts from a very different time when Weston and Brenda set up production as an art form with a mission to create handmade products affordable to the middle classes, at a time when the middle class was wide and dominant. Later, Warhol made production an art form that made prestigious art objects.

I do not think of these historical mugs as something one would use for everyday drinking. They are relics of a time now gone.

Weston and Brenda set up production as an art form with a mission to create handmade products affordable to the middle classes, at a time when the middle class was wide and dominant. Later, Warhol made production as an art form into a thing. Warhol made prestige art objects for the wealthy, but producing handmade art for the middle classes was far more radical.

Two Faces of a Lady by Brenda, done on a rarely produced mug form by Weston, a cultural archetype of a time when freedom bloomed on the coast of Maine, circa the 1950s

Brenda decorated pieces with the established patterns and spontaneously created one-of-a-kind decorative work. One-of-a-kind works were not planned; they just happened, but to have the ability to successfully execute artwork with such freedom, one needs to have an innate control of the medium, which comes about through repetitive practice. Mint condition.

Talked about in Freedom, AI and Being a Precursor to Recorded History

The grassroots fertilizes the mainstream but needs its independence!