The Fontaine Sisters

 

This is a photograph of a drawing I did in 1993 of my grandmother and her sister. They are "The Fontaine Sisters." My grandmother is on the left. At the time of the drawing, my grandmother was 88 years old, the same age my mother is now. 

It's a nice drawing, and good likenesses of each of them. (If you are thinking, "Lynne, your grandmother looks uptight," you are right. She was.)

The drawing is big. It's about 36" x 48" or so. It's been living in my closet since I moved to this house in 2014. but it's time for a change.

My mother did the painting of the bananas that's on that wall now. (It's about an inch smaller than the drawing in both directions.) On the bureau live framed photos of my family members, and I plan to hang The Fontaine Sisters on that wall. To do that I need to replace the picture wire on the back so I can hang it from the molding strip across the top of the room. I need heavier picture wire. I'll hit the hardware store after work to get it.

I had to remove the drawers from the bureau so I could move it away from the wall. (It's solid maple, so it's heavy) and this is what it looks like now.

This was at my dad's house and now it's mine. I'll hang it to the right of the drawing. I think it will all look really good when it is done. I read somewhere that if you have a collection of things you should display them all together rather than having them scattered all over. Well, this will be where the family pictures are.

I'm pretty excited.

Hands

        

There's a thing going on on Instagram about hands. I'll post this over there later, but I thought it was worth talking about here.

I always thought my hands were homely with all those veins showing, wrinkly knuckles and uneven fingernails. They were never the long slender hands and fingernails of the pretty girls.

An aside: My mother told me at fourteen that while I would never be a beautiful swan, I would always be a very pretty duck. While that sounds terrible, and at 14 it did, she also told me something else that would turn out to be true. "You have the kind of looks that will stay. You will be more beautiful when you are older than all the other girls your age." She was right. Nobody ever thinks I'm as old as I am.


My hands, however, look my age, although I don't think we know what old hands ought to look like.

When I hold my hands up, the blood runs down, and the veins in my hands aren't so prominent.

Years ago I was talking about my ugly hands to a girlfriend. "I think your hands are beautiful," she told me. "I think they have character."

One of my contour drawings from 1973

I taught Drawing to Adult Ed students for many years, and the first class was always blind contour drawing. You draw without looking at the paper. Everybody's eyes cross. Huh? The drawing will be crappy. Well, kinda. And you draw your hand, because it is the hardest thing to draw and if you're not looking at the paper, then it's going to be really weird looking. But that's not the point. What happens on the paper is irrelevant. The exercise is designed to teach you to SEE. As a drawing teacher I could look at the paper and know if the student was "getting it" even though they saw a bunch of jumbled lines. The side effect was I looked at a lot of hands.

I made an interesting discovery. Most people had boring hands. I stopped caring about what my hands looked like, except when I drew them.

After finding that drawing of my hand (above) from 1973, I wondered if I could recreate the way I held my hand in that drawing 45 years ago. I guess yes, and it proves that it really was MY hand.

Lynne Tyler, Self Portrait, 1987, Contour drawing.

Contour drawings are known for their expressive line quality and freshness. This self-portrait above, is a particularly nice example. The biggest thing contour drawing teaches is to see, but it also teaches you to measure with your eyes by teaching your eye and your hand to move at the same time, at the same speed and in the same direction.

We think about our hands as doing the tasks we do, but it's really our brain telling them what to do.

Hands are simply tools.

Sewing Room is Clean

The sewing room is CLEAN! Wow! The tables are clear of junk, the piles are gone. All I have to do is a little dusting and vacuuming, and it will be all finished. Pictures later.

Maybe before and after video, even.


This is a drawing I did of my son when he was 14. It is 3/4 life-size, so the head is about 7" tall. I have arthritis in my drawing hand, so I don't draw much any more. When you can do stuff like this, taking something apart to make it "better" is normal. So it's really hard for me to leave something alone when it didn't come out the way I planned.