Wednesday, September 4, 2024 The Human Face

“…there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. …it has something to do with incarnation. …Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant.” from the book Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I’ve been thinking about the human face – in particular how hard it is to draw one. I’ve drawn and painted birds and animals and have not found it too hard to get the idea across there. One robin looks pretty much like another. Animals have faces, and sometimes even unique ones, but nothing like the ensouled human face. I’m not just drawing a type of a creature, I’m trying to get across the individuality of a person. No one human looks just like another. Even identical twins develop slight differences that distinguish them from each other to those who know them well. The difficulty of communicating what makes a person look like who they really are, capturing the essence of them, makes you appreciate those who do portraits well. Much of it is in the eyes, I think.

I decided this week to do a drawing experiment. I picked out a photo of granddaughter Lucy from a couple years ago and purposed to do a drawing of it every day for a few days to see if I could get any better at capturing her. Each day I spent more time looking at the photo up close, to understand the relative sizes and proportions involved, the mixture of shadows and light.

After the first day, I dropped the bottom half of the photo. I find drawing hands to be almost as difficult as faces. I’ll work on that another day.

Each drawing gets perhaps a little closer, but I still haven’t found a way to communicate the essential “Lucyness” of that adorable face.

It was fun, though. Next time I’ll try to do one of grandson Oliver.

I’ll probably erase this in the morning.