TREASURE HUNTERS / But not everyone can make a living at the popular pastime of dealing in folk art, antiques

TREASURE HUNTERS / But not everyone can make a living at the popular pastime of dealing in folk art, antiques: "TREASURE HUNTERS
But not everyone can make a living at the popular pastime of dealing in folk art, antiques
Peter Sinton, Chronicle Senior Writer

Wednesday, February 16, 2000

When Dave DeRoche was a child, his favorite bedtime story was about the Lost Dutchman gold mine, not Winnie the Pooh.

``I always dreamed of finding treasure,'' he said at last weekend's annual Tribal, Folk & Textile Arts Show at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center, where he was selling African and other tribal art.

Trolling for treasure -- whether in a gallery, at the flea market or on eBay -- is captivating more and more Americans. As a sign of the times, ``Antiques Roadshow'' has become the top-rated public broadcasting show, with almost 14 million viewers each week.

Of course, there is a big difference between dabbling in art and collectibles and making a living at it.

Some of the 75 dealers at the show were born into the trade. A few others inherited a fortune, or made it themselves, and went into the art business because they enjoyed the lifestyle and didn't need to worry about money.

But most dealers at the Fort Mason show and elsewhere discovered a passion for Asian armor, Indian baskets, pre-Columbian statues, Persian carpets and all sorts of other artifacts, and pursued them without a financial safety net.

For example, Vicki Shiba grew up near San Jose, got a teaching credential at the University of California at Berkeley and taught in San Francisco grammar schools for three years. Then she took a leave of absence to spend three years on an odyssey to Indonesia, India, Nepal and other Asian countries. There she studied and collected Tibetan and Nepalese carpets, religious paintings called thangkas, bronzes and other arts.

After her return to the Bay Area, she continued to collect and travel but earned a living in public relations for the Japan Cultural and Trade Center, marketing greeting cards and other jobs. Finally, about a decade ago, Shiba decided to become a full-time dealer, selling out of her Mill Valley home.

``Business can be difficult; you have to ride the waves,'' she said. ``There's more demand for fine objects, but it's not easy to find them, and there are more dealers everywhere.''

Shiba relies on long friendships and good sources overseas to find rare objects. For example, at the Fort Mason show, she was selling an 18th century miniature Tibetan thangka painting of the wrathful deity Palden Lhamo that she bought from a trusted source ``in the field.'' The asking price: $6,000.

Shiba enjoys researching the pieces she finds as much as the hunt for them. That's fortunate, because buying art can be a gamble. ``You have to trust your eye and vision,'' she said. ``But if you make a couple of mistakes, you might be finished.''


FOOL'S GOLD
Getting fooled by a reproduction or making a wrong assessment on age and quality can hurt more than a dealer's pocketbook. It can tarnish a reputation.

DeRoche, of San Francisco's Gallery DeRoche, deals in both pre-Columbian and African tribal arts, two areas he acknowledges are rife with fakes.

It is nearly impossible to prove an item's provenance, or ownership history. That's one reason DeRoche gets excited about a 19th century Nigerian carved pipe made by the Ovimbundu tribe of Angola that he bought as part of a 42-piece collection. It was part of the Dunhill pipe museum during World War II, which is one of the reasons DeRoche put a $25,000 price tag on the rare piece.

The urge to quit jobs or leave home hits art entrepreneurs at different times.

DeRoche knew it was time to pursue his passion for antiquities when he was an editor for Annual Reviews in Palo Alto about 20 years ago. ``I would be proofreading a microbiology text and have trouble staying awake,'' he recalled. ``My body was telling me to do something more interesting.''


FROM COWS TO CRAFTS
Gary Spratt, a dealer in American Indian crafts who grew up on a farm outside Boise, Idaho, sought a change of scenery after he graduated from high school. ``I wanted to get away from milking cows,'' he recalled.

After studying creative writing and comparative cultures, he worked at the Butterfield & Butterfield auction house for three years before going into business, first selling Persian rugs from a store in Berkeley and then specializing in American Indian crafts.

Foraging for collectibles can be a tenuous living. ``It depends on what you come across,'' said Spratt, who sells at a handful of shows each year in San Francisco; Los Angeles; Santa Fe, N.M.; and New York. Mostly, though, he sells by appointment from his home in Rutherford in the Napa Valley. Some of his objects are pricey, such as an 1880s Western Apache 18-inch basket that sells for $38,000.

But many dealers find it increasingly difficult to uncover treasures, especially at a reasonable price.

That's not the way it was 30 years ago when rug dealer James Blackmon" "traveled to Afghanistan, where he got hooked on tribal carpets. When he returned to the Bay Area, Blackmon made a modest living restoring carpets before discovering he could make more buying and selling old carpets than repairing them.


TOUGH HUNTING
Blackmon, who sells by appointment from his San Francisco gallery, says his biggest problem is finding good material. ``It's hard to find any overlooked area,'' he said. ``Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan might open up for a year or two, but then it dries up.''

He also observed that with TV shows on collecting, online auctions and other sources of information, ``everyone is more sophisticated and collectors often view dealers as competition.''

Like Blackmon, Roger Cavanna went into the carpet business by accident rather than design.

After studying architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, Cavanna joined the Peace Corps in 1966 in Iran, where he bought his first Qashqai tribal rug. He got some money from his family and brought back some carpets for them and himself, and then paid for his graduate school by selling a rug every three months or so.

While pursuing a career as an architect, Cavanna fell into the rug business full time. After the 1978 revolution in Iran, a Tehran rug dealer, who was Cavanna's friend, sent him 14 bales of rugs to get some of his money out of the country. Cavanna paid $33,000 in COD shipping charges and said, ``the next thing I knew, I was in the rug business.''

He sold more than $1.2 million worth of his friend's carpets during the next two years and lived nicely off the commissions. Now, Cavanna has a gallery, Carpets of the Inner Circle, on Jackson Square in San Francisco. ``I love it,'' said Cavanna, who works with his son. ``I'm surrounded by textile art that reflects cultures that have pretty much disappeared.''


OLD RUG, NEW PLAN
Thomas Murray of Mill Valley was not initially interested in art, either. After attending Redwood High School in Marin with Robin Williams and majoring in psychology and anthropology at UC Berkeley, he planned to go med school. But those plans were shelved after he bought an old rug at the former Marin City flea market, got interested in textiles and then traveled to Asia for five months in 1977.

Since then, he has made a living collecting and selling textiles and archaic sculptures.

``Knowledge is power,'' he said at his booth at Fort Mason, surrounded by ancient carved stone megaliths from Sumba and other lands. ``Success is when you are able to buy something from someone who doesn't understand it as well as you do, and sell it to someone who knows it at least as well as you.''

One of his favorite finds was a mid-17th century Indian Mogul textile he bought in Indonesia, where it was not widely recognized or appreciated. He sold it for $25,000 to an Asian museum.

Like other dealers, Murray is not keen on divulging details of where he finds treasures or what he pays for them.

It's an up-and-down lifestyle. Murray goes into debt buying objects and then sells one or two and is flush with cash for a time. ``I've given up a lot for this,'' Murray said. ``I'm not married. I don't have kids. I live in an apartment, but it's an interesting life.''

As for an IRA or 401(k) plan, forget it. ``I have a textile collection of about 500 pieces,'' he said. ``That's my pension fund.''"