Hands are one of the most essential elements in our daily lives. They can comfort, direct, create, destroy and even help us communicate. It’s no wonder then that artists have been inspired over the years to depict this pervasive extremity.

Already an accomplished portrait artist and figurative painter, John Sonsini (b. 1950 Rome, NY) turned to painting hispanic day laborers found outside his studio, “Anyone who’s out on the street in the middle of the day looking for work, yes, that’s my kind of person, because that’s what I was doing at that age.”

Lee Mullican (b. 1919, Chickasha, OK; d. 1998, Santa Monica, CA) was an artist who, throughout his career, adopted the technique of automatism—a process consisting of letting the unconscious drive the production of an artwork—as his modus operandi.