Description
Bread Baker
By Marc Alexander from his ‘Touch’ exhibition. ‘Bread Baker’, Pencil on 300g Archival Paper, 10cm by 14cm, (2013).
Bread Baker
These days, bread seems to be mainly found plastic-wrapped on supermarket shelves, robbing us of the truly wonderful sensory experience of biting into a piece of bread warm from the oven that has a crisp crust and is incredibly soft and luscious inside. This is the kind of delicacy produced by my lovely wife, she is a really good bread baker. She knows just how to get the best out of the dough and she does this with a great deal of passion and dedication. Her recipe for success is, never to compromise on ingredients – and do as much by hand as possible. There is nothing that makes a home more invitinbg than the smell of freshly baked bread.
Touch Series
After a long season of producing portraits in oils, I returned for a while to the humble pencil. The ‘Touch’ exhibition, which opened at the Studio Gallery Kalk Bay on Friday June 14th 2013 and ran until July 3rd, was the result of that experience – a true celebration of the beauty and expressiveness of the human hand.
Several months before this show, a group of us artists got together in the studio to work on life drawings, and for me, hands are one of the most difficult parts of the human body to draw, so I decided to master this challenge by producing one hundred detailed drawings. Friends, family and even casual acquaintances, modeled their hands for me and in each drawing I tried to capture the unique character of each individual.
A great deal could be learned about a person just by observing their hands. For example, the slight hand gestures of a person in love, or the anxious mannerisms of the addicted smoker clutching his last cigarette, or the telltale scars and callouses which belong to a hard working laborer. The hands are young and old, lined and smooth and endlessly expressive and tell a hundred stories which are all captured in my hyper-realistic style.
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