A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. Michelangelo
I once sold bracelets. At a craft fair. Honestly, it was just a jumble of shiny cheap metal, cheesy ingots, haggling, and boredom.
The upside was the discovery that although structurally all hands possess the same elements, they are inherently very different.
For a little remedial anatomy, remember, that the ulna and radius of the forearm joins the 8 little carpal bones of the wrist and then attaches to another 27 bones in the hand. Male or female – no diff – well except for a minor genetic component that apparently elongates the male thumb. Hands have two muscle groups, three innervating nerves, skin differences on the upper and lower sides and finally, all of this has something to do with evolution, a Javanese tree shrew and the passing of 60 million years.
With all of this evolutionary effort they merit being difficult to draw. Hands have managed to come in all shapes, colours and sizes, and like bracelets, one does not fit all.
Apart from the dominance of visual communication, hands, come in second in the world of human communication. With subtle shifts in position they can imply violence, tenderness, delicacy, force, and intimidation. Whether calloused by a life hard-lived, or softened by a gentrified lifestyle, hands can and do betray the bearer’s life and gender.
The inherent complexity and flexibility of hands
Strong handshakes, youthful smoothness or sun spotted skin the seemingly enlarged veins that are simply a product of the fat tissue seeping from them with age… leaving the purple exposed and reminding us of a nearing end.
Across all fronts, these complicated appendages
With the possibility of 27 articulating bones, the range of positions and expression explodes.
have been our constant companions. From the art of the ancients to the impromptu drawings of street artists, the manner in which they are depicted reveals a body history almost as interesting as looking at a human face.
But this issue is not restricted to how they look… it is the technical difficulty of effectively rendering them to accurately argue the artist’s narrative.
The range of positions and perspective, accurate foreshortening, smudged shadows, and gender, all figure.
In street art, this problem is left to artistic discretion.
We observe the highly realistic hands produced by someone like Jenny Saville, in my opinion one of the queens of foreshortening to the work of Alice Neel, whose hands, so highly implied by a few brush strokes, are utterly convincing.
The hands of artist SydneygJones(?) fall in with the Need camp while the work of someone like KiKiz1313 definitely sides with Saville.
There is a whole world of hand in the realm of street art.
You have the famous illustrations of the highly simplified hands of TokiDoki’s characters.
Even the unmistakable and distinctive work of urban artist resolves this issue in an almost diametrically opposed fashion.
“Like a few other artists in the past, hands are my achilles heel, lol. Although hands do not need to look perfect most of the time, for example, Egon Schiele’s hands, they are drawn off measure and morphed into something much more beautiful than perfectly rendered ones. There is passion, poetry, mystery and pain in drawn hands which all of which are guided by the soul and not by the mind only.”
\Ankh Shadow on Melrose
Dr. Slick Green eggs and spam
In 1594, the great Caravaggio painted ‘The Fortune Teller’
(1594-5) and into the 20th century the infamous Irishman
Cheiro
Even the occult. managed to mystify hands with the advent of palmistry. A skeptical Mark Twain is rumoured to have written after a reading that the palmist had “…exposed my character to me with humiliating accuracy.”
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
Carl Jung
