The glimmer in the eye: how to spot a real Brad Keeler flamingo

Seven years of looking for Brad Keeler flamingos taught me what to check, what to forgive, and why the eye is the first thing to look at.

What I am looking for

When we go to an antique shop, my wife goes her way and looks for glass. I go looking for Brad Keeler flamingos.

I almost never find them. That is the honest arithmetic of collecting this: you look for years and you don't find them. They were made across a window of roughly twelve years, in a material that does not forgive being dropped, and the parts that make them beautiful — the legs, the necks, the beaks — are the parts that break. Most of what was made is gone. What is left is in somebody's cabinet, and that somebody is not selling.

So you look. You look at every case in every shop in every town you pass through, and most days you find nothing. And then one day there is one sitting on a shelf in plain sight.

The heron

It was in the owner's glass case. He had bought an entire Keeler collection and this had come with it. There were flamingos in there too, but I already had those — it was the heron that stopped me. I love photography. I take pictures of blue herons. And I had never seen a Keeler heron before.

I got down and looked up through the glass to read the base. Brad Keeler.

That is when I said I can't leave the shop without it. It was my birthday. I asked my wife to buy it for me, and she did.

I will never sell it.

Months later I met Brad Keeler's granddaughter, Cati Porter, and saw the heron in the company's own trade catalog. I had never found a catalog of his birds anywhere. There it was on the page, with a number beside it.

She had never seen a Keeler heron either. Then she saw two in one week — mine, and one belonging to a woman who wrote to her through the site about a heron she had bought and loved. Before that, none.

Thirteen years

He was born in Lincoln, California, in February 1913, the eldest of four. His father, Rufus Keeler, was a ceramic engineer and designer at Gladding-McBean's Lincoln plant at the time, and went on to help found two Southern California tile businesses — California Clay Products, known as Calco, and Malibu Potteries, whose work you can still walk through at the Adamson House. The family home in South Gate was built by Rufus to show what could be done with ceramic tile. Brad grew up inside his father's material.

He graduated from Huntington Park High School in 1931 and took an evening painting class at USC. That was the whole of his formal art training. In the mid-thirties he went to work as a modeler for the Philips Bronze and Brass Company of Los Angeles, where he made numerous figures — among them a set of enormous bronze parrots on pedestals — and, in the process, got very good at modeling clay.

In 1939 he set up a small ceramics studio in the garage of the family house in Glendale. The birds sold immediately. He leased about 5,000 square feet inside Evan K. Shaw's American Pottery in Los Angeles, and Shaw was impressed enough to add Keeler's birds to the giftware line he represented to the trade. More than fifty bird models were produced at that location, flamingos among them, by a crew of about sixty.

A fire destroyed the American Pottery plant in 1946. Keeler built his own 15,000-square-foot factory on Delay Drive in Los Angeles, on land his father owned, with one continuous tunnel kiln and several smaller kilns for experimental work — which is where the red glaze came from.

By 1952 Japanese imports were closing in on the business. The war had made him: imports stopped and his birds sold as fast as he could make them. Their return was the threat. He was building an even larger factory in San Juan Capistrano when a heart attack killed him at thirty-nine. The company employed about two hundred people. It did not survive him, and the new plant — never operational — was sold in 1953.

That is the whole window. Everything you will ever find in a case was made inside it.

The eye

I found out about the eye reading Cati Porter's site. She describes it as a very thin white triangle, like a sliver of pie, set into the eye to stand for a reflection. She is careful not to say every piece has it — she keeps finding outliers that don't.

That little glimmer is what makes them special. One small hidden thing that whoever was painting that day decided to put on the birds. It is a signature that isn't there. And he signed the bottoms too.

It goes to show you he was an artist at heart.

It is on my flamingo. Exactly as she describes it — a thin white sliver set into the dark of the eye.

Then I photographed the heron.

Same maker, same shelf, same house. One has it and one doesn't.

Why some forms carry it and some don't, I can't tell you — and neither can the family, yet. What I can tell you is what the photographs show: my flamingo has it, my heron never did, and both are marked, numbered, crazed Keelers. It is also worth remembering that a crew of about sixty did the decorating. The wedge is a decorator's habit, not the hand of the man whose name is on the base.

What I am not going to tell you is that this makes the heron rare. That is the explanation collectors reach for first and it is usually the wrong one. The honest thing to do is say what I found and keep asking.

What to check on a flamingo

• The mark first. Name, number, label, or the numeral font. Angle the base to the light; the in-mold signature runs shallow. A wide open bottom with nothing on it is a bad sign.
• Then the crazing. Fine crackle through the glaze should be there. Its absence on a bird that otherwise reads right is worth a second look.
• Then the eye. Look for the white wedge. It is the weakest of the three tests — other makers mimic it, and some forms never carried it.
• The small blue mark. Cati Porter reports a small blue mark on the base of almost every piece. Nobody yet knows what it means, but its presence is one more point in a piece's favor.
• The tape measure. Compare against the catalog height for that model. Copies run short.
• The wings. Feather detail on a Keeler is crisp and distinct, right down to the individual lines. On a copy it goes soft.
• The foliage. On a real one the leaves have modeled edges and shadow underneath. On a copy it is a wash of green.
• What isn't there. Keeler didn't decorate his bases with flowers or other embellishments they didn't need. Extra ornament is a warning.

That one lives on my shelf too. It is a perfectly good flamingo and it is not his, and the only reason I know that is the base.

The three marks

Not four names in a row. Three kinds of mark, with a break at 1946.

Mark	What it means
Incised script Brad Keeler plus a model number	In-mold, so it is part of the casting rather than something added by hand — every piece from that mold carries it. Used from the early American Pottery years onward.
Oval foil label "Hand Decorated · Brad Keeler Artwares · Los Angeles, Calif."	Introduced after 1946, alongside the in-mold mark rather than instead of it. Never placed on the base — always somewhere visible on the piece. Most are long gone, but the in-mold signature should still be there, and sometimes a ghost of the label remains in the glaze.
Stamped marks © B.B.K. / Made In / U.S.A. and variants	Also seen as BB Keeler, BBK, or BBK Made in the USA, in blue or black ink, with or without the copyright symbol. Used on small items and on the work of outside designers.
Bradster	The earliest work, from the brief partnership with a modeler named James Webster. Scarce.
Catherine Keeler	The last pieces, made after his death, when his wife tried to keep the company going. The end of the story, in a mark.

What breaks

The necks. That is where they go, and it is why a mint flamingo costs what it costs.

I have bought broken ones knowing they were broken. I don't care. They're still alive.

Buying broken pieces is typically not something you should do. But when you collect, you start with the broken ones because you can't find them any other way, and then over the years you find replacements in better and better condition.

How we ended up doing this

My wife and I went to antique shows for years before we ever sold at one. Every time the collection got a little bigger, we would say to ourselves, we could have a booth. Then we did.

Our first one was small. We sold a lot of what we had found over the years, and seeing the excitement on people's faces was the same feeling we'd had when we found them.

Then we did bigger shows — Torrance, then Long Beach — and started curating what we bought. That is how Owl & Twig started. Almost seven years now of buying and selling what we love. We shopped everywhere we could get to: Rose Bowl, Orange Circle, Pasadena, Palm Springs, and every other vintage market within reach.

I still go on every hunting trip. But I am only looking for three things: black panthers, Brad Keeler birds, and paint by numbers. That's it.

Why I write these

I want to know the history and the research behind the objects I am finding — things that are eighty years old now.

I find it fascinating that people built these businesses and mass-produced works of art that anyone could take home and enjoy. We don't see that anymore.

I want to celebrate the time these were made, when nobody knew what was coming. And now we have technology where anyone can research the past. I want to contribute to that, especially by documenting what I find in the wild.

These aren't Egyptian artifacts. But they are still artifacts, from three generations ago.

So buy the broken one first. Enjoy it. You may never find another.