Hands
Drawing and painting hands is a classic exercise in many traditions of artistic training. Michelangelo, a master of the Italian Rennaissance, was said to have been so stumped by drawing hands and feet that he dedicated a period of intensive study to observing and drawing only hands and feet. The drawings that follow are all part of a project, which I did every year alongside my advanced drawing students, of taking an object or theme and producing one hundred pieces. The series following was from 1996. All of the pieces here are on unstretched canvas with acrylic and chalk grid lines. Grid lines were a common feature of European Renaissance drawings. They are an ingenious method for transferring an image to another surface while preserving the original proportion. Here I'm using the grid to copy photographs of hands from magazine advertisements. I like the look of the grid as a compositional element; it adds an affect of hauteur to the work.