NOTES
Known as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Jim Dine combined his artistic interests in this lush etching and drypoint depicting paintbrushes. The curvilinear handles give each brush a figurative silhouette, and the exaggerated bristles bring to mind human hair or a long shaggy beard. Tools often feature in Dine’s work as autobiographical stand-ins that relate to his role as an artist and his childhood memories of his father’s hardware store in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Other prints created around this period that feature tools were given titles that evoke human anatomy, such as Thirty Bones of My Body and Black Beard. The title of this print, Five Paint Brushes, slyly refers to Dine’s own obsessive process of making and changing a composition. The single copper plate from which this print was made started off with the etched image of only five paint brushes. By the third state, seen here, the number had increased to ten paint brushes.
