Egg Scale, Oakes Mfg Co, Tipton, IN., gouache on board, 9″ x 12″
New painting, at long last finally done, no thanks to a rudely tumultuous Fall. Feh, arggh!, hurm… goodbye to all that, etc…
Now then – back towards then end of the summer I spotted this odd counter-weighted armature thingy in an antique shop in Duanesburg, New York. It’s an egg scale – with the weight of one egg, it shows what a dozen of that size would weigh. I love how unwieldy it looks. Most scales have a straightforward, rational design that embodies the notion of balance, calibration and measurement. This scale seems jury rigged, off kilter and improvised – in contrast to the abstract, timeless, geometric purity of the egg that it actually measures.