April 21, 2022: Repulsion, How To Display -

I’m starting a nine-hour Zoom class on Figure Drawing tomorrow– not because I like to draw, or because I want to become a master of figure drawing, but because my retirement goal is To Dabble, and I’ve never tried figure drawing before, and the class is being taught by someone whose work I love.

Preparation for the class involved purchasing paper and pastels and two books, one on drawing and one on anatomy* for artists.

I leafed through the anatomy book’s section on the skeleton, and started on the muscles, where I became entranced by the facial muscles. I couldn’t skim, even though I don’t think we are going to work on faces - I think it’s going to be all torsos and limbs. But the facial muscle section goes into wondrous detail about which muscles are tensed or relaxed in order to portray which emotions, and I found myself trying to exercise individual muscles as if I were doing isolation exercises. The levator labii superioris alaeque nasi, (the LLSAN, to its friends), for instance, does almost all of the work in fashioning a look of disgust.  

                                                                            (Illustration, p. 86)

And here’s how to look drunk:

“Slight raising of the upper eyelid beyond the normal open eye produces a staring, fixed gaze…. Slight relaxation of the muscle (causing the upper lid to droop) with the eye still remaining partially open suggests … intoxication, especially if the frontalis is also contracted in an attempt to hold the eyes open by raising the eyebrows.” (p.76)

I don’t know exactly who needs this guide to forming expressions. It feels like something the Martians would study in order to impersonate us better. And I don’t know why I find it so mesmerizing. But as you were reading it, did you find yourself working those muscles, staring and squinting and raising those eyebrows? I sure did.  

*Goldfinger, Eliot. Human Anatomy for Artists: the Elements of Form. Oxford University Press, 1991.