Hands
I have to admit the subject for our art group meeting – Hands – did not fill me with enthusiasm. My heart does tend to sink when a model is posing with a hand near the face!
So difficult when you have been concentrating on the facial features to have to add fingers and thumbs, and get them in proportion. so difficult not to end up with what looks like a pound of chipolata sausages.
So I began to think around it, and remembered how in his novel ‘Hard Times’ Dickens remarks on the fact that the mill owners referred to their workers as ‘the hands’ ; not people, just the part of them that does the work. And I remembered that a large part of that workforce were actually children, small hands that were sent under the great machines to pick up the cotton waste, and fasten threads that had broken. Dangerous work.
I have tried to draw one of these ‘hands’ from an article on Victorian child labour. I have used my favourite Paynes Grey pastel pencil and white soft pastel, with a little brown pencil here and there.
I am also reminded of a line from Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘North and South’ after Margaret Hale has been inside a cotton mill for the first time she writes to her cousin “I have seen Hell, and it is white”.