Tool Box 1 1966

Jim Dine made *Tool Box 1*, and he’s filled it with ghostly images of the things we use to fix stuff. See how the images emerge from the black ground? They are stark and ghostly as if the act of making and fixing is also like seeing a ghost. The artist uses light and dark, but it is the shapes of things and negative space between them that make this painting jump and sing. I wonder what Jim Dine was thinking when he made this? Did he use images of his own tools? Did he feel close to them? Did he think about the history of their production, or the person who first invented them? The image is split right down the middle. Does this speak to two sides of our brain? Or the space between things and images? Anyway, that is what I am thinking about right now. Painting is like that: looking leads to more questions.