Enter Marlin Miller, a wood sculptor from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, who volunteered to create a few live oak sculptures for free -- in part to leave his artistic mark on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but also as a service to the community.

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Meanwhile, the Ashmolean Museum, also in Oxford, has a tiny show of Brazilian baroque art, including expressive wood carvings by a legendary 18th-century mulatto sculptor who was nicknamed O Aleijadinho, the Little Cripple, because in later life he became so disfigured by disease that his assistants had to strap his tools to his wrists.

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But the sculptor isn't about to turn out tableaux in stone or wood anytime soon.

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Just as successful was one of the Egon Schiele gouaches that sold to benefit Ronald Lauder's jewel-like little Neue Galerie in New York, and a roughly hewn head in wood carved in 1916-1917 by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a German Expressionist sculptor.

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The latter will consist of three free-standing units a square glass pavilion (as a workroom for the sculptor's poet wife), a tall triangle of recycled steel (forming the sculptor's studio) and an arc-shaped monolith of untreated wood, whose patina will turn grey with age (for the couple's house).

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