A Focus on Hands

This week, our focus has been to complete our drawings for the paintings we’ll be starting next week. For one of my designs, I’ve decided to do something I’ve never done before – draw hands. The concept is still in progress – it combines a few of the personal mythology symbols I came up with last week, representing my life’s purpose of both exploring and expressing my love of beauty and the beauty of love. I’m not super excited about the composition yet (I only came up with the idea on Monday), but it’s a great opportunity to do something very different than my usual style, plus it has me spending several hours drawing the same subject for the first time. The great thing is that the more I practice drawing hands, the better they get (funny that!). Indeed, I’m learning a lot about drawing techniques (with lots of one-on-one coaching), patience, and more. I’ve had discussions with a couple of my teachers about the fact that although my left bottom hand in my third draft was based on a photo of my hand and looks quite real, three of the fingers look clumped together – not the most elegant look for a painting. An earlier version only had 3 fingers showing and that didn’t look good at all – sort of claw-like. So it’s not only about getting it to look real, but getting it to look good. It makes sense, of course, but all I was thinking of at the time was making it look like what I saw – an accomplishment in itself. I can certainly see my progress from these 3 drafts alone (they were in hard pencil, so quite pale – I had to darken the images for you to see, but you’ll get the idea). I’ve got more work ahead of me with poses that fan out the fingers in a more visually pleasing way. I spent over an hour today learning how to do that from my live hand (vs. photo) as David explained the advantage of two eyes over one lens.

Interestingly, this whole exercise has me focusing a lot on my hands all day since I’m posing as my own model. I can’t say I’ve been enjoying looking at my hands much this week. My body has been talking to me loud and clear since last week – it’s not happy! My eczema is back and it’s quite painful – the burning, itching, cracking and bleeding…. not much fun. This kind of nummular eczema is usually caused by environmental toxins and irritants (which there are plenty around despite my efforts to use only perfume-free soaps, detergent, etc. in a shared living space and laundry room), but I have a feeling it’s also diet based. Years ago I had tested sensitive to a variety of foods which I’ve been overindulging in here: tomatoes, onions, dairy, wheat, sugar, etc. (you’ve read my stories of pizzas, pastries, and Pakistani buffets). I’ve therefore cut all these out since Saturday in the hopes that it clears up a little before my trip to the Czech Republic this weekend – 3 days of restaurants will be hard on the system (but oh so delicious…. I haven’t had a breaded deep fried brick of Edam cheese in 20 years!)

I am so grateful for these hands though – as my concept for this painting is evolving, it has me reflecting on the receiving, giving, creative, and healing nature of hands, as well as deeper symbolism I’m still exploring in both my waking and dreaming time. It’s quite intriguing, therefore, that they should be so sore and unattractive these days – I’m quite self-conscious about them, but that isn’t stopping me from sharing this part of my process with you. I know there’s something bigger to this picture. Still working on figuring it out though…