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In a lifetime that’s offered more than its fair share of ease, opportunity, and joy, my partner Dan remains the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Dan is an artist, and he’s been up to some really cool things during the pandemic. I thought it would be nice to share some of it, and him, with you.
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I fell in love with Dan when he was nineteen and I was twenty. He studied product design in college, and this world of his—a mashup of engineering and art—was a completely new concept for someone like me who was studying more traditional subjects like history, literature, and political science. I marveled at all of the contraptions he had to build in his mechanical engineering courses. I admired the self-portraits he captured for his Photography 1 class. He painted me a bouquet of roses on our first Valentine’s Day together which I thought was a bit forward—we’d been dating all of one month! That summer, he told me that if he ever had kids, he wanted to be home with them, which was quite a thing for a young man to declare in those days. I was beginning to learn that Dan Haims was unlike any human I’d ever met, and maybe was someone I should try to hold on to. He’d go on to take a class in metalsmithing where he’d design our wedding rings in silver. But first he’d fashion me a tampon dispenser to hang on the wall of our bathroom next to the toilet paper—a beautiful yellow rectangle of plastic that hung vertically with a chute at the bottom. Whenever I praised his artistic talents, he’d clarify with a smile, “I’m not an artist, I’m a designer.” When I asked him what the difference was, he said “Design is making things for other people.”
Once our children arrived, Dan became the stay-at-home parent while I went off to my full-time job at Stanford. We bought a home with my mother and she provided child-care as well. When Dan wasn’t parenting, he took on part-time design roles, first at Savage Beast Technologies (which became the music streaming platform Pandora), and then at Thuuz (which made a sports recommendation app). As the years rolled on, he directed much of his creativity toward the kids, such as concocting extravagant scavenger hunts for their birthdays, devising elaborate pumpkin-carving parties at Halloween, and organizing Ukrainian egg-making open houses for Easter. In the occasional down-time he’d make stuff with the various tools in the garage.
One day a friend gave him a high-end DSLR camera that was left over from a conference swag bag. He decided to join in when a bunch of colleagues from Pandora were going on a photo walk. Afterward he noticed that his photographs were different than everyone else’s; he’d been drawn to very small details and texture whereas the others had focused on objects and landscapes. We went to the TED conference together in 2013 where he became entranced by the musician Amanda Palmer, whose mantra “you’re an artist when you say you are” struck a chord deep within. He began making photographs in earnest, largely of textures and patterns and from the man-made world in decay.
In 2016, I got another book deal which meant that my authorly career was becoming a reliable thing. He asked how I’d feel if he became a full-time artist. I told him I’d be thrilled to see that happen. Dan poured his heart into his photography. Flea markets were a treasure trove of fascinating familiar objects whose beauty others couldn’t see. He rented studio space. Began exhibiting and selling some of his work. Often he returned from photo walks with rusted objects. He started making sculpture out of his photographs. Then he turned to the rusted pieces he’d been gathering and built wooden frames around them, which became his “Wood & Rust” series. Next came patinaed copper set inside wooden frames. When our elderly neighbor, Rita, died, Rita’s daughter asked Dan if he might be able to do something with a bunch of old keys she’d found in her mother’s house. It became his first key collection, “49 Keys.” Keys would go on to become quite important in his life.
In late 2019 Dan began putting keys in casings and cages that he either found, built, or had donated to him, such as the two cages our friend Victoria found in the basement of an old house she and her husband had just bought.
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Some of the cages were huge, as is the one below in which you can see our daughter Avery crouching. Others are small enough to hold in the palm of your hand. He kept searching for keys, putting the call out online, buying them on eBay. He kept finding new ways to display and encase them. Nine months into the pandemic it seems so metaphorically apt to depict something stuck inside. Yet this concept of caged keys arose in Dan well before any of us had ever heard of COVID-19.
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If you’d like to see more and perhaps have a piece in your home, check out: www.lythcott-haims.photo
It’s been a joy to be alongside this human being unfolding into his whole self. When you’re partnered with an artist I think one feels deliberately chosen, and that’s the enduring gift of him.
xo
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