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When Ethan first approached me about being a part of The Tool At Hand exhibition at the
Art Museum, I thought it was an interesting and challenging idea. I decided that I would
make paintings of my tools-but they're not just tools, they're specialized. They're not
the tools you'd find at your local hardware store, or in the toolbox of your local armchair
handyman. These are the tools of a metalsmith, and more importantly, my tools of my practice.
Most of these tools are at least 30 years old-I bought them new-and they now have a
lifetime of being used by me. They not only have the wearmarks of my hands, and the sweat
of my hands; but my hands also have the marks of them on them.
I wanted to paint these tools in a very specific kind of way. The idea was to paint them in
a realistic way that would suggest the intimacy I have with them: that these are not just
things that I look at from afar, but things that I understand completely in all subtleties.
I understand their dimensionality, their surface, their color. I attempted to get a kind of
realism in the paintings, but I also wanted there to be a kind of sweetness and sentimentality
to the paintings, that suggested the deep affection I have for these objects.
The paintings have a kind of sweetness to them. They suggest the closeness with which
I hold these objects. I hope it suggests the fact these tools have lived through multiple
studios and bodies of work, and long days of frustration in the studio, and other long
days of ecstatic victory in the studio. Ultimately, I see the paintings as being as close to a
series of paintings that would represent an autobiography, as anything else I could possibly
paint would be. My life for 30 years has been about work-that's what I do-and these tools
are the evidence of that life.