Description
Piano Player
By Marc Alexander from his ‘Touch’ exhibition. ‘Piano Player’, Pencil on 300g Archival Paper, 10cm by 14cm, (2013).
Piano Player
I have always had a love for piano music but growing up in a home with no musicians opportunities to learn this instrument where few and far between. Only once I left home. Years ago, when I worked at the Pretoria Art Museum, I took a few piano lessons on the Museum’s grand piano. Sitting there on the piano chair and running my fingers over the keys, I felt deep down that I should be able to play this instrument. Maybe it’s just a deep desire for something that will never be.
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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