Two wide gold bands photographed on black velvet, the surfaces alive with hand-scraping marks — the tool's pressure visible across every inch of the exterior, the facets catching light at dozens of angles, the gold's warm depth reading differently in each zone of the surface. The bands are substantial and wide, clearly cut from heavy stock, the one troy ounce of gold distributed across both as mass and presence rather than as thin elegance. The interior of the upright band catches the light in a single warm pool. These are not refined commercial wedding bands — they are handmade objects, and they show it completely, every mark a record of Sidney's hand at work.
The hand-scraping technique — working the surface with a sharp tool to create the texture visible across both bands — is the same craft approach Sidney applied to the brass and silver rings he made for sale throughout his career. Here it is applied to gold, to a commission of singular personal weight: his son's wedding. The scraping marks are not decoration imposed on the surface but the surface itself, the texture of the making inseparable from the object made. Every facet is a stroke. Every stroke is Sidney.
The 14k stamp — hand-applied, as the catalog notes — is the final act of authorship. Sidney did not simply make these bands and hand them over. He stamped them: claimed the work, certified the material, put his craft's mark alongside his son's name in the permanent record of the object. The stamp connects these rings to the signed paintings and drawings in the collection — the gesture of the maker saying: I made this, this is what it is.
Catalog item 1683 is the last numbered entry in the collection. That the sequence ends here — with gold bands made by a father for his son's wedding in September 2000 — is not incidental. The collection preserves what Sidney made across a lifetime: figure drawings and oil paintings and watercolor creatures and scratchboard self-portraits and glazed pottery and handmade rings for sale. And then, at the very end, this: the thing he made not for exhibition, not for sale, not for a class assignment or an artistic experiment, but for the day his son married.