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."
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| 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.
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| 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.
