Lost in the crowd

I know you'll remember my fascination with the wide-eyed young woman on the left in Pontormo's "Visitation" -- and the painting that evolved as I paired her with another young woman spotted in a Boston crowd last fall. 

Well, it happened again, thanks to my current project of browsing through art history for poses for my One Hundred Hands project.   I opened up Google Images for Filippino Lippi, son of the only vaguely familiar (to me) Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi. 

And there he was -- in a presumed self-portrait on the sidelines of his "Dispute with Simon Magus."

That gaze!  I had to give it a try -- not to copy exactly, but just to spend time getting to know that face.  Also, I thought,  I could try working on one of the small canvases I bought recently as an alternative to the fine arts paper I usually work on.

And so I set to work on "Young Fil," as I called him -- restraining myself, though, from putting him into a backward baseball cap.

Things developed quickly and easily, and I was quite pleased and excited.

  

But it was at about this point that I allowed myself to think something that had been nudging at me over the course of a week:-- his nose was too long.  I hemmed and hawed and decided to belatedly accept the counsel of artist/teacher Richard Schmidt:  "Never leave a mistake on the easel."

Okay.  So I painted over the middle of  Young Fil's  face and re-did his nose:

 

This looked quite promising, especially when viewed from across the room -- a familiar painter's technique for assessing progress.

Up close, though, it was a different story.  I had to admit that the placements I'd made in relation to the too-long nose were now off-kilter. (I should have listened to Richard Schmidt's whisper earlier in the week).   The mouth should go a little more to the right, and the subject's left eye should move a little more toward the centre.

So many ups and downs.  Should I try to correct, feature by feature?  Or should I just paint the whole thing over and start again?  Maybe give him a baseball cap after all?  I didn't have the heart to deal with it.

For now, he's been consigned to sit out a few games (maybe a season) in la panchina -- that's Italian for the dugout. 

You didn't know they played baseball in Italy?  I'm not talking about the feats of Italian-Americans Yogi Berra or Joe DiMaggio -- but actual on-the-ground baseball in Italy, a gift from the New World to the Old.

And maybe the last word on my Young Fil experiment belongs with baseball legend Satchel Paige:

"You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them."

What a handful!

 

When I was in Junior High, I created a personal logo -- my own version of the symbol known as an index.  I used it to mark my school notes, where it even attracted the attention of a boy I admired.  His dad was a printer and he himself had a liking for typefaces. He'd created his own whimsical version of, oh, let's see, maybe Times Roman -- and I've combined the two in the image above.

It was the traditional printer's index that I emulated -- knowing even then that my finger lengths were inaccurate, but that was part of its charm.

No wonder I stopped in my tracks in mid-gallop around the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I saw a beautifully drawn historic hand -- though not, as it turned out, the pointing variety.

  

Fairly recently, I learned that the pointing hand symbol is also called a manicule, and it has a much longer history than I'd imagined.  View this charming short video from BBC and you'll learn all about it.

Hands in themselves are of course of great interest to artists -- and to scholars and practitioners in dozens of fields.   Not long ago, I came across the work of archaeologist Dean Snow who's been studying handprints in prehistoric caves.  He started by looking at research on gender differences in hand formation as collated in the Manning Index.  According to Manning, there's a consistent difference in finger length between male and female hands:  In a female hand, the ring finger is often shorter or the same length as the index finger.  In a male hand, the ring finger is often longer than the index finger. 

And guess what?  Viewing lots of prehistoric handprints, Snow concludes that an abundance of these are distinctly female hands.  Whoo hoo! -- So much for "Prehistoric Man."   You go, girl!   And if you need more substantiation for the female role in prehistory, check out poet Ansel Elkins' stunning account in her "Autobiography of Eve".

You'll have noticed that I continue my fascination with hands in my life drawing sessions.

Sometimes they risk confusion with my Junior High logo, and I'm really trying to move beyond that.  Hands are acknowledged as being difficult to draw, and tons of teaching material is devoted to analysis and various techniques.

 One thing that's consistent across methods:-- as with almost everything, it's practice and more practice that makes the difference.  And so I decided in mid-February that, in addition to my other art routines, I'd draw 100 hands -- one a day.  At first, I started out with a small sketchbook, thinking a little "Hand Book" would be fun to do.

Rather quickly, I found that the small format was limiting -- and meanwhile, there was also a limit to the poses I could do with my own left hand.  The thought then occurred to combine my readings in art history with hand poses based on the work of individual artists. 

Reviewing paintings and selecting poses from Google Images (which I've loved since we were first  introduced in about 2003 !!), I've become more familiar with artists who I'd known before -- and I've made some entirely new acquaintances.  When I pick up my pencil tonight, I'll be looking for hand pose #66 -- from Rembrandt, no less.

It's been fun, too, to recall my long-ago logo and the interest in typeface and calligraphy that eventually emerged from my crush on the printer's son.  I used to say that in another lifetime, I'd been a monk in an Irish monastery, happily applying pigment to illuminated manuscripts.  Learning that "my" index has medieval origins suggests I might have picked it up way back when.  Well.  Seriously....  But why be serious?