Remains to Be Seen

I've sent off three drawings this week, and left two others at the store, to be called for when the subject, an up-and-coming, and quite attractive young novelist, comes in to do a reading from his new book. Of the three I put into the mail, two are going to the people I drew, and one is on its way to the subject's mother. That last is a gesture to a friend, or friends, I should say, as while the writer depicted has been a friend since before his first book came out, some time ago now, his mother has subsequently become something of a friend of mine as well. Dear lady. She raised a good son. He's become quite a good writer too, though that doesn't enter into it, except in so far as that would be the reason for drawing him and posting it here. I don't draw my friends much nowadays. In fact, I almost never draw my friends, or anyone I love, any more. Used to do, but not always with the happiest results. Still happens -- both the sketching and the unhappiness -- and so while I should like to be able to say "lesson learned," obviously I can not. Anyway, this guy's mother rather liked the last drawing I did of him, and as I specially like her, I sent it off. Haven't heard back yet, from the mom, but that's the one, interestingly enough, I'm fairly confident will be best pleased. I'm generally a pretty fair judge of mothers. Most often they've rather liked me, and the drawings I've done of their sons, even when they haven't always approved of everything else I may have got up to, back in the day, with their boys.

Actually, I haven't got up to much in the way of sketching, or really had better say, anything at all much, with any one's son lately, and while that's as it should be -- all things considered -- still, it feels necessary to make the point explicitly just here. There was a time, now ever so long ago, when a #2 pencil was perhaps the surest point in Cupid's quiver, if you will allow me that without too much wincing. It's true. It may not be all that easy to believe, and believe me, I quite understand why, but there was a time when boys were quite flattered when asked if I might sketch them, and they often let me. True, that was in some ways a more innocent period, for all involved but me I suppose, and the boys back then weren't perhaps the most sophisticated models. They tended not to distinguish between what even then was really just a rather slight gift for portraiture and an eye for comic exaggeration -- to say nothing of the distinction between pure and impure impulses, admiration and lust, high and low art, etc. I had a reputation, all a little vague and not altogether savory even then, as someone who was good with a pencil and paper. The idea that what I did best, at least with a pencil, was hardly the stuff of either deathless beauty or even always kindly meant, was easily over-ridden by the novelty of anyone finding these boys -- even if just their faces, supposedly -- interesting. Boys generally speaking, just aren't very interesting. I wasn't, at the time, in most ways save this one. Most boys are aware of this, sometimes painfully so. To be told otherwise, to be asked to sit for a drawing for instance, once it was understood that they weren't being mocked for their crooked teeth or their "bad" skin, while it didn't necessarily convince them that they were more interesting than they suspected, could, and often did, suggest that there might be something there, though they'd no suspicion what or where that might be, that someone else, even if only another boy, had noticed and liked. Many of them, after some none too subtle or gentle cajoling, were at least willing to allow for the possibility and see what came of the experiment. Usually, all that came of it was a brief sketch. Sometimes though...

I've mentioned here before that, from childhood, people have been at me to draw them, and that I was quick to learn that however sincerely most people make such a request, or demand, they don't mean it. Many if not most people would like to think they have a personality and a face that might lend itself to being sketched, at least, just the once, if only by me, but very few people who ask, or demand, have actually thought much about just what it might be that provides interest in the individual human visage, or what it might mean to see one's kisser, however attractive it may be assumed to be in three dimensions, when reduced to two. Drawing a good likeness, of even a very young and attractive person, of either sex, at least for someone like me, has all to do with what makes a face individual, rather than beautiful, per se. I may have an eye for beauty, but not a very good hand for it. Put it another way: what I like best in a face, even a face I find specially attractive, need not be what its owner would think, and even if it is a dazzling smile, or lovely dark eyes, or whatever's been made mention of before by other admirers, for whatever reason I'm usually drawn to to the one sharp canine or the weary little wrinkle, to what others, including the person who may heretofore been otherwise either unaware or horribly self-conscious about these details, would either not notice or would rather that no one else did.

They've studied babies, you know, really quite new babies, and found that lovely faces make them smile. It's instinctive, evidently. And what makes a baby smile tends to be exactly what would make the rest of us older, hairier humans respond positively to another human face: symmetry, first and foremost; the equality of features and the balance in their distribution, so that one lovely eye is always paired with another on the same plane, lips and teeth likewise evenly arranged left to right, cheekbones, chin, forehead, all just where they should be and in proportion, each to the others according to some formula apparently settled long since by the trial and error of evolution or the Deity. At least among the cognizant, adult population, this obviously does not preclude the possibility of finding a face other than that of the venus de milo either attractive or lovable. If it did, of course, for the vast majority of human beings, there'd be little chance of making new human beings, those very babies who, in all innocence, seem to judge the rest of us so harshly. Character for instance, which babies, rather selfishly tend to reduce to the willingness of the beings around them to feed and comfort them, becomes a more complex business as we mature, and something we look for in other people's faces. The poet, George Crabbe, in his Tales of the Hall, says somewhere that, “The face the index of a feeling mind.” That sort of thing begins to matter more to us, one would at least hope, when we cease to be babies.

What I liked best, lets be honest, about drawing boys back in the day, was the possibility of getting their clothes off them. As I say, worked now and then, too. Adults I drew to flatter them in a different way, mostly; because I admired them, as teachers or personalities, and wanted their praise. Didn't turn out to be nearly as gratifying as I'd hoped. Most of them, if they saw the results, even if they'd asked to see them, tended to be more pained than pleased. Turns out, adult vanity is a far more delicate thing than a teenager's, a teenaged boy's anyway. Didn't draw girls nearly so much. Go figure. While adult males, much to my surprise, tended to be, as a group, if nothing else, fairly good humored, and while adult females, bewilderingly, seemed invariably to blame themselves for any flaws exaggerated by my pencil, my fellow male homosexuals have turned out to be the least likely to appreciate the gift of caricature. Might seem an obvious, even stereotypical assumption to make, but I fail to get this. If men are almost always more vain then women, then gay men, after say the age of twenty one or thereabouts, and gods know, after forty! are perhaps the most sensitive subjects of all. Even if I still wanted to, getting into a gay man's pants with a pencil would not seem to be an option anymore, at least for me. Even getting a laugh out of these queens would sometimes seem to be much harder than it ought to be. However affectionate I may mean to be, it sometimes seems that most gay men, even the most wickedly self-satirical, even old friends, do not always appreciate even the warmest of my little jokes -- if it means showing their crows-feet, or their bald-spot, or exaggerating slightly, or even just noting accurately, a paunch.

(Dykes, by the way, have been uniformly the first to laugh, and the first to ask for an original drawing. This, I should hope, rather undermines, in a small way, that business of just who it is in our community who hasn't much of a sense of humor about themselves, now doesn't it?)

But honestly, I am the problem, or rather, the narrowness of my gift would seem to be. I suppose that if I could draw people as they saw themselves, or at least as they would most wish to be seen, I might even have made a kind of living by drawing. The trouble is, I don't see that way. Even the people I might most admire, even people I think most attractive, even the people I actually love, I find... funny, for want of a better word. I see myself as a rather absurd figure most of the time. I see other people as such, more often than not, as well. I think, as human beings, as among the most remarkable achievements of evolution, we are nevertheless all surprisingly odd looking, each in his or her own way, and that frankly fascinates me. However much I may admire the way someone writes, or thinks or makes art, however attractive I may find a particular face or person, I can't seem to help myself. I find almost everyone funny. When I draw someone, even or specially someone I admire, it isn't the "flaws" I look for, or any supposed imperfections I find myself exaggerating, as it is what is most human and ridiculous in even the best people and or the most interesting faces that I try to reproduce on paper. I also find my inspiration most often in some particular of a book title, or an author's photo, or something in the publicity surrounding a new book, that tickles me enough to want to draw a picture. May be a lack of seriousness in myself, or a refusal to take anything I do too seriously, but I can't seem to take even literature, or the people who make well, it all together seriously. I have tried. Doesn't work out very well, usually. Solemnity and awe just aren't something I can successfully convey with a pencil and paper.

I once painstakingly drew what I'd hoped would be a very respectful likeness of James Baldwin, who had only just died. He was the writer I may well have admired most at that time, and I very much wanted to honor his memory. I took quite uncharacteristically long over that drawing. I was careful to exaggerate nothing, to reproduce the photo I was working from as exactly as I could. The result was hideous, a grotesque that more than one person who saw it expressed a genuine concern that that drawing was likely to get me labeled a racist. I loved Baldwin! I loved his writing, his speaking, his face. I thought, and still think that James Baldwin had one of the best faces of recent times. Yes, he described himself as being ugly, and I am not suggesting that I didn't see that, or that I somehow saw past that, but rather that I thought I might be able to show in a drawing, even more than in the photograph from which I was working, how really amazingly wonderful Baldwin's face could be, particularly, as in the photograph, when he laughed. I thought I might just have captured that joy.

When I showed that drawing to someone I trusted, someone I'd drawn and who had actually been delighted with the drawing I'd done of him, he told me, "You really must never show this to anyone else, ever." I never did. The last time I looked at it, some time later, I could see nothing of either joy, or the effort I'd made, only how ugly not James Baldwin, but my drawing was. I threw it away, and I've never tried to draw that marvelous face again.

Yet obviously, I'm still at it. I'm good at it. I'm not good at many things, but I don't think it is saying too much for myself to suggest that, at least in an amateur way, I'm good at this. I've confined myself, for the most part recently, to either quickly doodling people unawares, or drawing authors, as they are public figures, if now only in a somewhat minor way, and ought therefore to expect a certain amount of probably unwanted attention. I've had the very happy experience of hearing from some of the people I've drawn to post here, and been told that I made my subjects laugh. Nothing so gratifying. I've offered the originals to a number of my subjects, and had some who've been quite eager to have them. I've even been brave enough recently to offer the originals to some folks I knew not at all, and have been pleasantly surprised by the response from most.

One friend who was not amused, at all by the drawing I did, when pressed, said that he neither liked nor understood the point of caricature. I don't know, considering his sophistication and education, and his sense of humor as evidenced elsewhere, that he would say such a thing of satire in any other form, or any other sort of literary pasquinade, but with unflattering pictures, at least of himself and presumably other authors, he will have no truck. Obviously, I think he's wrong. Just as obviously, had I known him better or suspected his disapproval before I spent a few hours drawing him in what I'd hoped was a no less flattering than amusing light, I wouldn't have drawn him at all. I was genuinely mortified to learn I'd offended him, specially as I'd hoped more than anything to make him smile, even laugh. I did not however destroy the drawing, or even take it down from here. It is a good one, I still think, and a tribute, I still say, however insignificant, to how seriously I take what he's written and how much I admire him. I seldom can bring myself to draw people I do not, in some way admire or at least find significant. No one does a caricature of people one would expect to go otherwise unnoticed. I certainly don't sit peering through two pairs of glasses, drawing and erasing and drawing yet again someone's left ear without thinking there is more than to the head it hangs on than I can do justice to in an evening.

(Why I'd never make much of a political cartoonist, I suppose, politicians' faces tend to be roughly as interesting as their ideas.)

If one were to detect a lingering hurt in that last bit, doubtlessly any objective observer would call that only fair. Fair enough. Nevertheless, I will defend what I do not just for the pleasure it brings me, and most of the people I choose to draw, but as a legitimate form of both art and flattery. No one would take such pains, for the most part, but to comment on a face with something significant in it. Everyone needn't like what I do, but there is thought, and feeling in it.

Which is why I'm rather hoping, if most past experience is any index, that I didn't just make a special trip to the post office on my lunch hour just to provide a few people with something with which to line a birdcage or start a small fire. Remains to be seen, hereafter -- or not.