Faces and Hands on Bulbs

my screaming face and some hands holding money and bills

I've found myself making a lot of faces and hands this summer in my bulb forms. Last week I made some bound hands, and a face with no eyes. This week I made several pieces with hands and one face with another in the works. 

the start of my screaming face

On the weekend I did some sketching because I wasn't feeling full of ideas at the end of last week. Among many others, I ended up with an image of a woman in a MAGA hat screaming angrily. In the photo, she was screaming at a protestor or someone who wasn't a fan of Trump. I can't remember, can't find the original image I was looking at, and only sketched the angry woman.

my sketchbook with a screaming lady surrounded by abstract bulb ideas

I decided to try to to capture that scream in the bulb. I've used the bulb form as a head before and was fairly happy with the results, though looking back at it now, it seems much less lively than the ones I've done this summer. 

my face from last year

When I started to sculpt the screaming face, I realized I had a sketch from the side and needed a frontal view. I did an image search for "woman screaming at protestor" and similar phrases to try to find the image I had been looking for and was actually pretty disgusted with what my search results showed me. The vast majority of the results were pictures of a bunch of nude women who had stripped to protest violence against women in Argentina. I don't mind this being among the search results, but it dominated the results for a variety of searches, none of which included references to nudity or gender based violence. I also found images of a woman who apparently was turned into a meme after protesting at the inauguration in 2017. I wasn't able to find the image I had seen the day before, even after searching a variety of different phrases.

the "colorblind" face from last week

Since I wanted an angry, hateful facial expression, and not a crowd shot of women's bodies, I changed my search terms to simply "screaming woman" and later "yelling woman." Perhaps predictably, the first results are images of women who are frustrated, scared or pretending to be screaming in a not-very-convincing way. When I changed my search to "screaming man," I found the angry facial expression I was looking for and had seen on the woman reproduced in my sketchbook. 

Apparently stock men scream in anger and stock women scream only in exasperation or fear. It reminds me of the difference between a female painter's depiction of female violence and a man's depiction of the same subject. (I've linked to Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes and Caravaggio's depiction of the same event. Look how physical the act is in the former and how distasteful and uninvolved the women seem to be in the latter.)

my screaming face, drying

Once I had the reference images, I found the mouth fairly easy to get right, but the eyes were tough. Part of the trouble is that they are scrunched up and in shadow in the photos, whereas the mouth is relatively large and well lit. I actually had to remove the eyes entirely three times before I got them looking how I wanted them. First they were too big, then the bottom lids were too large and the pupils were pointing in the wrong direction, then the top lid was angled in surprise rather than anger. I finally got them close to where I wanted them and let them dry for a while that way, but I made the mistake of cleaning them up a bit once they had dried some. I think the roughness of my penultimate draft is better than the final version. 

the rough draft of the scream after I revised the eyes three times

I know I want to make at least one more face, but I intend to cover the eyes in that one. Now, looking back at my photos in progress, I want to make another attempt at these angry eyes. I figure the practice will be good for me anyway, though I'm also aware of an impending deadline this month. (Aaah!) As of today, I have finished 24 of the abstract bulbs and 26 of the political bulbs. This week felt much much better than the previous two weeks. On Wednesday, I did no studio work and basically just read for the entire day. I felt especially good about the work on Thursday and Friday.