Editorial
        How to Handle Hands?


In his book "The Hand" Frank R. Wilson tell about George Mc Lean. In the fifties George McLean earned a bachelor’s degree in art, and went to Los Angeles to study automotive and industrial design. After a brief stint in the navy he returned to Stanford, where he began work on master’s degrees in both art and education.


During this period, in 1959, disaster struck:
I was working on a home-shop do-it-yourself project and one day I reached down to turn off the machine-a saw-inthe normal way, just as I’d done before on another piece of equipment. Then I realized that the power switch was on the other side, so I proceeded to reach down, underneath, and put my hand through the blade. Of course I realized immediately that I’d done something very stupid. As soon as it happened I closed my eyes, grabbed my hand to stem the blood flow, and got my brother-in-law, who was there with me, to put a tourniquet on and call the ambulance. While he was doing all of that, I asked him, "There’s just one thing I want to know - do I still have my thumb?" He said, "Yes," and I said, "I thought I saw it. Okay."

He was thinking at that moment that if he still had his thumb he would be able to hold something; he would have the ability to grip. He did have his thumb, but the remaining four fingers on his right hand were gone. He was taken to a hospital, operated on, and the next day a surgeon visited him to explain what would happen next: he would have to learn to use his left hand. To begin training his left hand to take over for the right, the surgeon gave him "the old drill" of maneuvering a half-dollar across the fingertips.

I took me half an hour to learn to do it in both directions without dropping it. In the second half hour I was able to do it with a dime. Breakfast that morning was a boiled egg in a cup, still in the shell. I was damned if I was going to call in anyone to help me, and I figured out how to crack that shell and get the egg out. I was pretty determined.
Within a day or two I started to write with my left hand and I found that I could write upside down and backwards. The slant was slightly different but otherwise it wasn’t that much different from writing with my right hand.
George wanted to be able to do everything with his left hand that he had been able to do with his right hand before. And that included drawing upside down.
...

I became a jeweler about five years after the injury to my right hand. As soon as I started using my right hand again to grip, I realized how important my art training had been: we had been thaught to draw using major arm muscles. We didn’t even do tiny details with the fingertips. That meant that I was already more or less trained to hold on to something with my thrumb.
What I found is that the right hand is the tool holder and the left hand is the manipulator. You have to hold the tool exactly so that it does the same thing every time. You rotate the work to the place where it should be.
If I’m doing very accurate work, I seat the hammer against the chest. I very seldom hammer with my left hand. It’s hard because you need to grip the object you’re working on. Learning how to control the tools used in jewelry-making can take a little as two or three month. And it takes in quite a few senses. It takes in the sense of hearing, as well as the physical sense of how a tool is touching something else. For example, with a torch you are concentrating on heating something without melting it, so you’re visually focused tightly on what’s going on there. But you are also sensing the sound that the torch is making. You can hear a change in the mixture of oxygen and gas, depending on where the torch is. Of course vision plays a very big part, but there is also the physical feeling when the tool you’re holding is in the proper position and is making the proper contact.
When you’re filing or hammering, there’s also the sound. Hammering on a piece of metal is like ringing a bell. A person needs to have feeling for all of those things. You Know, tools are very sensual things, and using them can be. The filing, the polishing;drawing is very physical, sensual. Filing is almost like petting a cat.

[Frank R. Wilson: The Hand, page 140-142, New York 1999]