Drawing the face by touch

This was another morning drawing that was an attempt to get different senses working together at the same time. (See also: Steve Reich, rhythm and colour constructions)

Students are asked to work on large sheets of paper, and are asked to make sure they have the ability to extend these in any direction by cutting out extra rectangles and adding them to the initial piece of paper. Everyone is asked to close their eyes and feel their head with the hand they do not use for drawing. Starting at the back, students are asked to think about how the hair gives an initial textural set of information, then asked to press harder they are asked to feel for the bone beneath. One texture replaces another. They are not allowed to take their hand off, but once the back of the head is explored, the top is investigated, then the front, then the sides, some areas being touched several times as the hand makes its way between other sources of information. Students are encouraged to feel inside noses, mouths and ears, to think about how a pair of glasses extends out from the surface of the head or how an earring may suddenly change the textural world.

Then a palette of marks is made, tests and try outs using different media whereby they are trying to make marks that approximate to touched ‘feelings’.

Finally the drawing begins, students are told to forget what a head looks like (this is impossible but the idea is to remind them that this drawing doesn’t need to rely on their memory of what a head looks like), and to begin feeling again before drawing.

Students are encouraged to start at the back of the head, reminding them that when collecting ‘touch’ information, there is no back and front, just a continuous surface. As they start drawing they are to invent surface information as a trace of passage. If they are feeling an ear, how does a mark change from hair, hair over bone to the cave like entry for the finger, then how does the feeling tone shift from open to closed surfaces? Fingers might trace their way across the top of a head and down over the front, moving over one eye and missing another. Alternatively a hand may be moving up from the neck, over the chin and then move left once the mouth is met and go on towards an ear. Fingers may of course explore the inside of the mouth and as this is just a continuous surface, the information continues to just spread over the paper as the student draws.

Questions such as the nature of up-ness and down-ness in a world without sight are asked. Is this drawing now becoming more about distance positioning?  One eye is ten thumb lengths from the other if the feeling is done around the back of the head but only a single thumb length, separated by a nose bridge the other way. How do you know it’s the same eye that you are coming back to? If you were feeling someone else’s head how would the information be encoded? You ‘know’ the fingers have reached the nose, but if you were feeling someone else’s head you might perhaps mistake one area for another.

One thing students are asked to do is to draw a continuous ‘feel’; this is done by drawing a ‘felt’ line that stretches from the back to the front and to the back and to the front again. Starting with perhaps the left ear, the fingers feel over the front of the face (or back), to the right ear, around the back to the left ear again and onwards to the right ear again. If there isn’t enough room on the paper for the marks they can add an extension.

Some students start trying to make the marks very textural by adding perhaps sand or crinkled paper, they are however encouraged to try and make the texture visual, as these are not drawings that will be read by touch.

Finally the drawings are put up to ‘look at’.

Some students were never able to get away from a memory of a head. They force all their marks to make an image that has one side, always the front of the head, eyes always related to a nose in exactly the same way you would get if you saw the head. Others can let go and you get strange spread out images of heads where intimations of ears, noses etc are spread out over a wide area. In the crit students are reminded of the huge size their skin would be if it was flattened out and pinned onto the wall.

I did this at the Swarthmore once and one student really took off, making an image with six noses, five ears and ten eyes, each feature simply drawn as his fingers encountered it, sometimes as his hand come down over the front of his head, and at another time as his fingers moved from the back to the front after exploring the neck. 

As an exercise in exploring synaesthesia it was I thought quite a good one and it’s implications often re-emerged much later in the course when students were making sculpture.  Exhibitions of sculpture for the blind were quite common at the time and there was some debate as to how the work should be done. Was it simply good enough to let blind people touch and feel sculpture? Should sculpture for blind people be constructed specifically as a felt experience?

My thoughts on this overlapped with things I learnt from working with an Indian sculptor who came to work with us at college. (He had a show in the Art Gallery and we hosted him in the ceramics area, which was then on Cookridge Street) He told me about how his teacher made them touch and feel significant sculptural works blindfolded. They had to search out significant form and in particular key points of dynamic change and point them out to the master. These moments were indicated to the students by the master once the blindfolds were removed. Often important form shifts that had been found by touch were not obvious to the eye.