-Teddy Roosevelt- still bank 1919

This still bank of Teddy Roosevelt, made by the A.C. Williams Company, is like a tiny monument to big ideas, cast in metal. It's got this golden-brown finish that almost looks like it's been aged by time, or maybe by the dust of history itself. The texture's the thing that gets me here. You can almost feel the roughness of the metal, it's not trying to hide its materiality. Look closely, and you can see how the paint has settled into the nooks and crannies, highlighting every detail of Teddy's determined face and that jaunty hat with the little red star. It’s like a folksy version of Mount Rushmore - the scale is all wrong, of course, but the same impulse is there. The decision to render the spectacles as blanks is particularly interesting. Is this a comment on Roosevelt's notorious policies, or simply a result of the limited possibilities of the medium? What do you think? It makes me think of Guston, another artist unafraid of mixing high and low, weighty themes and clunky forms.