-Rhinoceros- still bank c. 1910 - 1925

This -Rhinoceros- still bank was made by the Arcade Manufacturing Company. Look at that deep, dark brown - almost black - iron, with hints of rust. I can almost smell the metal shop where it was cast. The Arcade Manufacturing Company wasn’t trying to capture the real rhino in all its wrinkly grey glory. Instead, they went for a kind of Platonic ideal of rhino-ness. Imagine the process: molten iron poured into a mold, cooling and hardening, then popped out and given a rough and ready paint job. It’s so different from the way I work with paint, building up layers, scraping back, constantly revising. I wonder if the designers at Arcade ever thought about the kids who would be feeding their pennies into this little guy, teaching them about saving, one coin at a time. It’s a humble object, but it's also a testament to the power of design, of turning base metal into something that sparks the imagination. We're all artists, really, building on each other's ideas, riffing on the same themes, trying to make sense of the world in our own way.