"My Puzzled Mind"

The first sculpture I ever fell for was Jim Dine's Two Big Black Hearts, at deCordova outside Boston. I remember the day, it was warm, sunny, and seeing it first from across an open field, striking even at a distance. As we walked closer, the surface gave up its details slowly. Are those... tools? By the time we could touch it, I was speechless.

That piece never left me. It's the reason I care about sculpture as a medium, semi-figurative work as a genre, and pieces that read as one thing far away and something else entirely up close. Themes that still shape this collection.

Whenever we commissioned new work, artists would ask what moved me, and Two Big Black Hearts was always the answer. I'd looked into buying a Dine piece over the years, but the timing or the budget never lined up.

In April 2024 I was in Venice for the Biennale opening. I'd spent the day at the main campus and was riding the water bus back to my hotel, leaning on the rail, when a banner across the canal caught my eye: "JIM DINE: DOG ON THE FORGE."

I got off at the next stop and worked my way through Venice's streets to Palazzo Rocca, the 14th-century palace that held the banner. My Puzzled Mind stood just inside the courtyard, the first piece to greet visitors. I hadn't known the show existed when I booked the trip, some fifty new works by Jim, and I walked through slowly, grinning the whole way. Dog on the Forge is still one of the best art experiences I've had.

I asked to speak with the gallery manager. If I wanted to buy this piece, I asked, how would I even get it from this Venice courtyard to Eugene? This is the Artist Proof, she told me, and Jim's foundry is actually in Oregon. So I could just drive over with a trailer and pick it up? No shipping at all? It felt like fate. I called Michelle that night to tell her. She was just as excited, and we decided to buy it.

A year later, Blue Mountain Fine Art in Baker City cast the piece, and it was installed here in May 2025.

I still can't get over how unlikely the whole chain of events was. If I had been standing on a different side of the boat, if it had been after dark, if the foundry was located anywhere but Oregon. Any one of those and this piece never finds its way to Chaos.