here's a sneak peak of what's coming to the etsy store...
and Heads up, soon, on my funkomavintage website, I'll be offering New. New things I find in my vintage travels....like...Margaret O'Leary sweaters, and all manner of things that aren't vintage...but totally with the funkoma look.....which is?
Which is rustic, classic, heritage, nautical, antique, midcentury, steampunk, romantic...tarnished and tattered....and just generally clever.
1929 cast aluminum The End of The Trail Mission bookends.
Mission style, Arts and Crafts, Craftsman and Prairie style art, architecture and home decor all are influenced by each other , and have a lot of similarities. They all celebrate handmade, handforged, hand-assembled and handcrafted as a political rejection of industrialization.
With the rise of mass production in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the filthy factories and mind-numbing inhuman work conditions that stole families from their rural lives, many philosophers, intellectuals, poets, writers, artists, craftmen, witches and healers decried the blossoming Capitalism.
William Morris, John Ruskin, Rosseau, Oscar Wilde, Gustav Stickley, Walter Crane, Rosamund Marriott-Watson, the Roycrofters, and so many more challenged the "profit over people" ideology that is Capitalism. They knew that without beauty, without art, without leisure, without respect for the working man and woman, life is banal and brutal.
It is these thinkers that inspired the back to the earth movement of those times, and the bohemians of the 1920s, the union movement, the grow-your-own, the beatniks, and the hippies....
Young people that think they might have invented Handmade, like on etsy, are so funny!
It is those historical bohemians, that coalesced into an identifiable movement almost 200 years ago in reaction to the destruction of the slow and small lives that most humans had led since time began.
The Slow Food, artists lofts, handmade, farmer's markets, buy local, think small, and the support small business ethos began 20 decades ago, and for the same reasons it still resonates and has become popular again, and again.
I could go on for pages and pages...on this era of design and philosophy.....and I think I shall ! It's my favorite ....from the mid-Victorian through the 1970s.....but especially from 1890 to 1939.
Aluminum history......
The history of "The End of The Trail"....
American-born artist James Earle Fraser, sculpted The End of the Trail for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California.
Placed in the Court of Palms at the entrance to the Expo. Fraser’s statue was a fantastic success and he was awarded the gold medal for sculpture. It entered the public mind and many reproductions, and near-repros followed for decades.
Of course, America's greatest export has always been the romantic Wild West! The Indian's life has been changed forever with the movement west. Long gone were the open ranges and they were relegated to reservations and shipped to cruel city environments.
The End of the Trail created a desire for more sculptures to be cast in bronze, but the United States entered into World War I, and bronze became very scarce. Many artifacts from the Exposition, such as plaster sculptures were tossed into a mud pit at Marina Park.
A few years later, the citizens of Tulare County, California, rescued The End of Trail in 1919 and placed it at Mooney Grove Park, near Visalia, California. In 1968 it was finally cast in bronze, and the cast sculpture was placed back in Mooney Grove Park.
The beatnik...
and the Paint By Numbers made in "spare time"....
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