Helen Malta, Boys Selling Bananas, Color Pencil Drawing, 1930s mid-century ashtray giving it strength and a

giving it strength and a nice sheen

and the perfect display pedestal for all sorts of things--though of course it's great as a stool

filled with humorous quotations

There is light rusting to the interior of the tin

there are notes on the middle disk relative to positions of bow and beam

Helen Malta, Boys Selling Bananas, Color Pencil Drawing, 1930s mid-century ashtray giving it strength and aThis is one of several just in drawings by Helen Wagner Malta (1912 1975), which I am completely taken with gentle and sweet without being saccharine, delicate but decisive, and always surprising. This one certainly calls the drawings of Paul Klee to mind, but feels to me really fresh and immediate I can just imagine the young artist standing before these two young men on a New York sidewalk, buying her fresh fish and bananas! The colored pencil used