Description

Contemplation

By Marc Alexander from his ‘Touch’ exhibition. ‘Contemplation’, Pencil on 300g Archival Paper, 10cm by 14cm, (2013).

Contemplation

Seeing these old hands, one can only surmise that this man is at peace with God and the world, and in a deep contemplative state of mind. Perhaps pondering the mysteries of our cosmology and what our universe looks like. And why no earthly curvature can be perceived or measured despite our modern technology and instrumentation.

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 14^th 2013 and ran until July 3^rd, 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.