100 Faces in 300 days, part 5: family resemblance

I thought a bit of families and family resemblance in the Easter week. These  drawings are of my sister Leilani (1966-2007), her daughters Sofia and Bea, and my stunning cousin Carolyn. The men are my husband Vagn's sons. (Faces 80, 79, 70, 82, 68 and 2 of the 100 Faces project.)

Getting a likeness is incredibly exciting (and also quite demanding). Building up someone's face through pencil strokes (tentative and experimental ones) is also an extremely intimate and personal process. It is as if one were touching a person's mouth, their teeth, their eyes -- what human beings use to see, eat, plead, stare each other down, etc.  It was actually on account of this (the feeling that I was intruding on a person's space) that I started drawing strangers: an effort to desensitize myself, not get excited, keep a cool distance from their humanity. But then it became time to find out whether I could still maintain that objectivity while drawing someone that I knew.

With the shift to subjects I knew -- or more correctly, subjects who would know that I had painted them -- the notion of accountability was there. I would have to work harder than I already did.

In drawing freehand, so to speak, without guidelines or grids, a dialogue begins between me, the artist (the viewer and capturer) and the image -- though not necessarily with the person himself. A commitment is forged in the hour or two that it takes: a pledge to be as faithful as possible to what I see, out of respect for the subject. A promise to put my ego aside (the part of me that says, "I am the artist and this is you -- deal with it!"

Sometimes the end product merely reflects the moment that I stopped erasing and redrawing, thus letting myself off the hook and declaring the picture finished.