I usually scan my face, but today I thought it was time to give the hands some attention.
An oddly delicate part of the body, I love the way the hands are posed in medieval paintings of Jesus. The poise and minute specificity of expression that they allow is made into this still, reverent, biblical image - Jesus himself holding the proper pose, the symbolic ideal. As an icon, he must be perfect. And yet the humanity of hands - their grasping, touching, curling - also communicates the humanity of Jesus himself, as a human avatar, as a God-made-man. That's his whole thing.
Hands are such a site of interaction. Holding hands is a sign of peace, understanding, love. And they're very hard to draw.
So then, it seems even more intimate to scan my hands than to scan my face, in a way. Here are the means by which I do most things. Here are my agile little fingers.
Here is a myriad of small bones. Aren't they a marvel?
ReplyDeleteI think one of the reasons it's so though to draw them is that they are usually "more complex than the rest of our entire body" specially because of the unique shape an personality each finger has. It's hard to keep track – the rest of our body looks pretty symmetrical by contrast