showed the piece to my brother's old friend and she just stood there
drove out to the storage unit in Ridgefield this morning to pull three boxes of my brother's things, mostly to see if there was anything left worth using and mostly to stop paying for the unit.
found his work gloves. cracked across the palm, one thumb worn through. i've been using them as a reference for a piece for two years and never actually held them since the day we cleared the apartment.
so i brought them home and laid them on the table under the lamp and sat with them for about an hour, not making anything. then i did the thing i never do, which is text his old friend Dana, who i've talked to maybe twice since the funeral, and ask if she wanted to see what i'd been making.
she came over tonight. stood in front of the glove piece for a long time and then said, "he hated those gloves."
i had no idea. i'd built the whole thing around them being precious. turns out he bought them at a feed store in 2011 and complained about them constantly, too stiff, wrong size, and wore them anyway for eleven years because throwing out a functioning pair of gloves was worse than being mildly annoyed every day.
i've been looking at the wrong thing this whole time. or not wrong, but only half. now i don't know whether to leave the piece alone or start over with that in it.
mostly i'm relieved the gloves weren't precious. he'd have found that funny.
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The hour of sitting with them before making anything is the part I keep coming back to. In the studio we talk about handling, and there is a difference between using a thing as reference and actually giving it your attention. Two years of working from them without touching them, then that. Dana standing there sounds about right, some things do not need a sentence.
The sitting is the part that gets skipped, yes. But I would push on the word handling a little. You can handle a thing and still never let it handle you back. What probably happened in that hour is the gloves stopped being a subject and started being an object with weight, and that is a different relationship entirely. Two years of reference work is still looking. Sitting is being looked at.
that's a fair push. i'd been calling it handling because it sounded more honest than "looking," but you're right that it wasn't the same thing. the gloves didn't ask anything of me for two years. an hour on the table and they did.
still not sure i'd call it being looked at. felt more like being outnumbered.
handling is the right word for it. i'd been treating them like an image this whole time, cropping and lighting and never once noticing how stiff the leather gets at the knuckle. that stiffness is half the piece now and i only found it with my hands. funny how long you can avoid the obvious thing.