Visit to the Tool Museum

Visiting Tom Friedlanders's tool museum was an amazing experience! Not only is he a science teacher and a collector, but I believe he is an artist as well. He reminds me of Hugh Francis Hicks, a dentist who collected 75,000 light bulbs which are now in the Baltimore Museum of Industry. I read about him in a book called The Accidental Masterpiece, by Michael Kimmelman who is the chief art critic of the NY Times. An essay on this collector is in company with essays about Pierre Bonnard, Philip Pearlstein, Wayne Thiebaud, and other artists. Kimmelman describes his book in its introduction as, "a book about how creating, collecting, and even appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece."

Photographs of the tools will say more than I can about Tom's collection.

Here is Tom Friedlander.

And here are tools that he loaned to us to draw in art class this week. I'm going to shine a direct light source on them so that the students can practice shading with charcoal, pencil, and gray, black and white pastels.