From the Artist
The visual objects chosen as the subject for this print are industrial gloves taken quite literally as shown in a chemical supplier’s catalog. Although I am usually careful to wear things such as stockings, shoes, and gloves in matched pairs, occasionally I end up with mismatches (usually because I get up early in the morning and get dressed while it is yet dark, and I don't want to disturb my wife by turning on the light). Therefore, it seems plausible that some chemist or toxic substance handler might mismatch his or her gloves some time...
The title however, A Right Hand...Having No Idea What the Left is Doing, makes a twisted allusion to an oft-quoted scripture from St. Matthew of which Christ admonishes, "But when thoudoest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth...."
—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records
[I] admire artists who have the facility and restraint to deal with observable forms by implication: suggesting, hinting, or otherwise providing visual clues (rather than explicitly rendering everything), thereby allowing the viewer to participate in the art-making process by using his or her imagination to complete the pictures. Despite the admiration, however, [I am] compulsively self-indulgent in the pleasure of making crayon tones and tusche washes on slabs of Bavarian limestone and plates of grained aluminum. [I am] unable to resist working images to a level of finish that denies the viewer the right (or rite) of optical completion. To make things worse, [I] prefer small, intimate formats over larger ones (which rubs against much of what [I] was taught in graduate school by professors who thought in terms of Abstract Expressionist and Pop issues). [My] idiosyncratic preferences for small scale and high finish seem to derive in part from a boyhood of viewing art in reproduced form in books and magazines rather than in actuality on gallery and museum walls. That perception of art may well have something to do with [my] choice to employ thin veils of ink printed on paper rather than paint on canvas, drawing material(s) on paper or fresco on damp plaster walls.
—Excerpted from https://artistprintmakerresearchcollection.org/aprc-artists/wayne-kimball/, accessed 6-24-2021
A Right Hand...Having No Idea What the Left Is Doing, 1995, a color offset lithograph in an edition of 100, allows Wayne Kimball, Jr. to experiment with his work. Kimball rarely creates prints larger than 16 x 25 inches; instead, he favors small, intimate formats and is a master of the miniature. An actual jewelry theft inspired the image of a gloved hand holding a diamond in a day-glow palette. This print has photographic realism and demonstrates the depth of an artist's drawing talent as a Tamarind Master Printer. Kimball's intention is to challenge the viewer to use his or her imagination to complete and interpret the image.
—Adapted from "Fresh, Human and Personal: Signature of Brandywine Workshop," Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004)
