University of Darwin in Australia and the University of Natal in South Africa. It also celebrates the wonder of the natural world around us.

Middlebrook is proud that his children are carrying on his devotion to art. His oldest son, Jason, is a successful artist in New York; a daughter is an actress who recently wrote and starred in a one-woman play. A stepson is a tenured professor of art at Foothill College. He and his wife brought half a dozen children to the marriage: They each had three from a previous marriage.

He credits a trip to Northern Italy in 1983 with changing his choice of mediums. A master of ceramics, he said he struggled with the instability of the material and found it to be limiting. In aArcadia Press

Drayton Hall: The Creation and Preservation of an American Icon

$15.99

As the most significant 18th century estate assembled in the British American colonies still in existence, Drayton Hall is an icon of American history, design and preservation. Its story is told through archaeological artifacts, architectural research and documentary investigations, with a focus on the inhabitants and their connections to the wider Atlantic world. A multitude of scholars contributed to our understanding of Drayton Hall as the first complete example of Palladian architecture in North America, its placement at the intersections of the European Enlightenment and America's slave society and as a family home where extraordinary events became landmark historic moments. Today, Drayton Hall is valued as the most authentic pre-Revolutionary southern plantation that helps examine the creation of