Unrecognizable Characteristics

I’m a liar. My face lies. Or, maybe it’s my hand that does the lying. In any case, I assure you that these lies are out of my control. Honestly. My impetus, when I started this series of drawings, was to discover a truer picture of myself through works possessing some of the energy, depth and motion of life. What I got though shocked me.

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes at length about how we all mislead ourselves into believing that we are feeling something we aren’t. In looking at portraits, I’ve often attempted to read the feelings or the temperament of the artist or the subject—be it the much debated Mona Lisa, one of Ingre’s slightly-twisted portraits, or Maria Lassnig’s internalized self-portraits. The work I’ve done on my own self portraits has led me to question if what I’ve noticed in other artists’ works is not their intentions, but something I’ve put there.

My drawings are blind self portraits, auto portraits. Blind gestures internalize the drawing process. When drawing in this manner, the artist merely tries to trace the movement of his or her eyes—noticing how the hand slightly lags behind, the drag of the graphite on the surface, slight fluctuations in gaze or head tilt. The artist becomes a drawing machine of sorts, one that tends to expand and contract lines as concentration wavers leading to curious results. My drawings, taking maybe five minutes for each stage, done one stage a day for about a week, are intended to be erased at the beginning of the next day’s session. Mere traces are left behind as evidence as the drawing moves on. Satisfying results are often sacrificed in favor of less successful renderings on subsequent days and a feeling develops that resolution is never a permanent state. Inconsistencies have a tendency to multiply day to day and when applied to a face hold special significance.

While the study of emotions in facial expressions has a long history. Darwin wrote about it in his The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, in the 1870’s; Arnheim elaborated on it in Art and Visual Perception, in the 1950’s; Donald Brown included examples of it in his Human Universals, in the 1990’s; and scientists like Steven Pinker see the development of the recognition of facial expressions in humans as an evolutionary adaptation today. I never understood its implications until I noticed the results of my on-going drawing series. How determined are we that what we see is correct. How easily are we fooled.

What I’ve noticed is that invariably, the emotions I find in the distorted portraits I’ve done have nothing to do with how I felt when I drew them. They are always wrong. They aren’t exhibiting some hidden truth about the way I felt. I am sure of this. Sadness, chagrin, paranoia, pride, sheepishness, etc., are not emotions I was feeling as I drew, but they are exhibited in the drawings. They are the result of physical distortions accumulated in the process of drawing. Of this I am certain. And yet, even knowing this, when putting a group of these drawings together, I am compelled to wonder at whether or not I am seeing my hidden character emerge in spite of myself. So powerful is the belief in the necessity to read a face correctly.

Perhaps the paradoxical question here is: Do a series of lies add up to a truth?