Faces are hard: the first in a probably infinite series
This week I read John Singer Sargent’s quote that “a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth”. This made me feel better about how the faces I draw very rarely come out looking the way I originally wanted them to. All of my drawings have wonky parts, but it’s only faces that can be completely changed by a couple of stray lines.
One of my drawings this week was of a figurine I found pictured in an art book. It’s of Kuya, a 10th century Japanese priest. His teachings centred around a particular chanted phrase that he believed was the key to salvation, so the figure is of him chanting this phrase. The thing that caught me about it (small version here) was how the expression on Kuya’s face had this mixture of tension and calm. There’s clearly an effort to say the phrase, but also a sense of surrender and peace. After drawing it, I had a new respect for how difficult it must have been to convey such subtlety in the figure, as my version makes him look like an undead mummy soldier.
But the face problem had actually come up earlier in the week, in a much more cartoony drawing. Because of a train cancellation, I had to take a route between Reading and London that involved, instead of no stops, seventeen. I decided that I would draw how my face looked when we got to each station. Again, just a line out of place would change my expression from boredom to anger, confusion, or in the case of the Wokingham face, barfing.
I guess it’s going to take some practice to be able to get a better control over what happens in the faces I draw. Although if Sargent never got to the point where he was doing faces right, I’d also better get used to the idea that there will always be some surprises. Compromise goal: fewer surprise puking expressions!
