My own antique road show find!

My TV guilty viewing pleasure is "Antique Road Show" on PBS.  I love the goofy stories that people have regarding the seemingly worthless items that they bring to the show to have appraised only to find out that the item is worth $75,000!   Yep, just saw that last night:   a guy brought a bronze statue of a Chinese warrior that his Dad ran off with from China during WW2 that turned out to be worth a cool $75k.  Not bad for some run of the mill wartime looting.

 

So, right after viewing TARS, the Missus and I went for a walk in the neighborhood and laying in the bushes at a cul-de-sac was a piece of art!  Well at least it looked like art.  The irrigation sprinklers were running and doing a fine job of watering my find.  I snatched it out of the water and carried it home, dripping all the way. 

 

The Missus was skeptical that my find was Road Show worthy but I was intrigued as the picture and the matting are both signed and dollar store art usually isn't, so I did some research on line.

 

The artist, A. Andorka (a Hungarian name by the way) apparently was based in New York City because many of the images of pictures that I found were of scenes of the city.  Others were plants in various poses such as the one I found.  The art has sold from a low of $5 to a high of $200 in recent auctions.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any information on just who A. Andorka was.  The watercolors seemed to stop in the mid 50s. 

 

So, what is the story on my scraggly piece of found art I wonder?  I suspect that someone moved from the east coast many years ago to the Los Angeles area and brought the art with them.  They grew old and either passed away or divested themselves of their possessions, one of them being this picture.  The morning of the day that I found the picture was trash day.  Perhaps the picture and other things from the now passed on oldsters from New York City were tossed in the trash but this fell out and blew into the bushes for me to find it.

 

Now what do I do with it?  I'm thinking to thumbtack it in the garage so sometime in the future my kids can toss it in the trash.

 

 

 

 

Here it is, a bit worse for being watered.

 

 

 

 

"Twigs of the Sweet-Gum Tree" by A. Andorka
And here I thought at first it said "Twigs of the Sweet Gun Tree".  Now that would have been interesting on the Antique Road Show!