Welcome to another installment of Brandish, a Pyragraphic portrait series featuring artists of all energies along with the unsung tools that they brandish—those tools without which the artists would not be able to do their specific batches of creativity.

While we post a new photo every week on our social media channels, this is a compilation post to share more widely the encyclopedic and idiosyncratic tools that these artists brandish.

Vanessa Bowen, Painter

“As a painter, everything is done with my hands meaning my paintings are prone to human error. With tape, I can make perfect lines and I’m not spending hours on end to create the perfect line, messing up, and going back over. It’s a solution for my sanity. Without it, I’d go crazy.” —Vanessa Bowen | Painter

Lance McGoldrick, Installation/Assemblage Artist

“I’m immensely attracted to decay. Everything I do is made up of things I’ve found that are in states of decay. I don’t polyurethane my pieces. I’m making no attempt for my pieces to be permanent. I fully accept that they are impermanent, that they are from decay and that they will continue to decay.” —Lance McGoldrick | Installation/Assemblage Artist

Jason Fink, Woodworker

“I completely refurbished this plane from being a rust-bucket flea market find. I have that connection to it. A lot of my work is power tool driven; I’m not going to grab this for every project. But the ability to remove controlled amounts of wood makes the plane the essence of woodworking. It becomes symbolic of the whole thing.” —Jason Fink | Woodworker

Kevin Pierce, Production Designer

“My notebook is the tool I brandish because it holds all the information I’m going to forget eventually. It’s tangible. I can always go back for names, numbers, addresses, locations, notes, drawings, measurements. It becomes an assistant. It holds the concrete evidence of conversations, meetings, and ideas that take form.” —Kevin Pierce | Production Designer

Nora Hickey, Poet

“Jughead always struck me as so himself because he never did anything the whole gang wanted. He was this renegade who never explained himself. If a person views the world a certain way, they shouldn’t have to explain it. I use language in my poems that evokes the emotion I want. Jughead reminds me to be ballsy about expressing my views.” —Nora Hickey | Poet

All photos by Clarke Condé.