FACE FACTS

The one thing we can do to maintain our skills and to increase our abilities as artists is to practice, practice, practice. Except of course there’s no double secret, magical instruction book to tell us what we should practice on. For generations artists have turned to the human face for a subject.

Why is that you ask? The cat is more supple, the vase more versatile, even the landscape is more varied, why do faces, because they are available and cheap. Cheap? Cheap the artist’s best friend, next to available of course. No artist ever has enough money, but every artist has a face, and if it isn’t one of Nature’s miracles, so much the better. And it will work whenever the artist wants. Ever wonder why so many artists paint their wives and girlfriends?

Also, there is no awkward moment when painting a face. If you are tired of doing your own, then there are hundreds, nay thousands just wandering around out there waiting for you to immortalize them and they’ll do it. No screams and cries of “help, police!” Too dramatic? Try walking through the mall and asking anyone at random to pose nude and see how long it is before you are explaining to the police how serious an artists you are.

So the face is cheap and available, but is it something worthy of an artist’s efforts?

Damned right it is. For one thing it has every known artistic challenge all in one place. You have to deal with light and shadow, perspective, anatomy, size, location, contours, planes and when you done all of that try catching a likeness.

Drawing the face calls on all of the skills an artist needs to excel in his craft. The delicate play of shadows caught in the folds of the eye, the location of the mouth and nose and what about those awful ears? Then there’s the hair. Hair is a nightmare of blocks of shadow and delicate line drawing. Still listening?

Some exceptionally talented artists simply give up and walk away. One local luminary said, “Good luck drawing faces…”, as he ran past my sketch pad. This is an artist who makes news when he doesn’t get juried into a show. How scary is that.

But even though it is scary and hard, it makes for a good work out. What is that thing the exercise gurus always say, “No pain, no gain.” True enough and if you really want to exercise your creative skills try faces for a week or so. Me, I’m okay, if I could just get my portraits to look a little more like the people I tried to draw and a little less like Earnest Borgnine