Art talk: What's so damn difficult about hands?
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
One local artist sees a resurgence in realist art and portraiture. That means if you want to paint people, you've got to do it right.
Wikimedia Commons
The Philly art scene is certainly no stranger to abstract, conceptual, nontraditional, even bizarre work.
But for those artists who work in the realm of realist, humanist work — that is, hyper realistic portraits of actual people — one of their great challenges is, arguably, getting it “right”: For realist portrait artists, well, a person’s got to look like a person, with all parts of the body rendered near-perfectly.
One of the biggest challenges therein, says Port Richmond-based artist Peter Kelsey, is the painting of human hands. Kelsey, an instructor at Studio Incamminati, one of the schools in Philly focusing on realist art, is offering such artists the chance to master hands with a 10-week course at the studio, which runs from April 16 to June 18.
Why are hands so difficult for artists? For one, they are made up of so many miniature parts, and have such extensive range of motion.
“Hands are such an expressive part of the body, the second most after the face,” Kelsey said on the phone Monday. “Humans are so attuned to hands, speaking and articulating, that if they’re done wrong in portraiture, it’s really obvious.”
Kelsey, who paints commissioned portraits — he’s working now on a portrait of former Pennsylvania Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman — has been studying anatomy as it relates to art for 10 years. He said the trick with painting hands is all in the structure.
“My tip is you have to really understand the basic building blocks of the hand. If you understand the subordinating details, the hand becomes really manageable,” he said.
In the course, students will hear lectures from Kelsey on the tendons, bones and musculature of the hand, and work with live models to conquer the skill. This week, he’s working on another realist class that has students drawing human figures without skin.
“In the past 10 years, there’s been a revival and interest in realist art, in traditional art,” Kelsey said. Such a revival is a matter of the “pendulum,” he said, of art interests swinging back and forth — resurgences in realism come and go, just as they do for other art forms.
It’s clear that for any artist looking to master portraiture of people, getting a handle on the hands is imperative.
“Hands are so uniquely human,” Kelsey said.
Learn more here.
