Touch Assignment

 

Unveiling Internal Physical Perception

Digital Artwork

 "What is a sense of one's self?  To a large extent it has to do with touch, with how we feel... Not that our sense of self is necessarily accurate.  Each of us has an exaggerated mental picture of our body, with a big head, hands, mouth, and genitals, and a small trunk...Touch fills our memory with a detailed key as to how we're shaped.  A mirror would mean nothing without touch."

-Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, p. 95.

 

With this drawing, I wanted to visually capture Ackerman's description of how we internally perceive our physical bodies.  This sense of constant awareness through touch is represented by the spiritual, glowing figure within the mirror.  The outer glow represents touch--the wider the glow, the greater the perception of that area of the body.  So, the head and hands have a large glow, which gives them greater touch significance.  I placed the "perception" figure in a mirror, to show that--though she looks at an exact duplicate of herself in the glass--the woman is also seeing this 3 dimensional, holistic version of herself there.

The Hidden Life of Hair

Gouache on Watercolor Paper

8.5x5.5in 

 

"Besides being sexy to most people, head hair protects the brain from the sun's heat and ultraviolet rays, helps to insulate the skull, softens impact, and constantly monitors the world only a hair's breadth away from our body, that circle of danger and romance we allow few people to enter."

-Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, p. 87.

 

When I first read this quote, I immediately thought of plants.  They are living and active--yet their realm of time is imperceptibly slow.  To fully see their wonderful movements, you must speed up time.  In a similar way, you have to alter time--and a little of reality--to fully visualize all the wonderful things your hair does unbeknownst to you.

Though I took a surrealist approach, hair truly takes each of the exaggerated forms I painted.  The woman's hair floats and swirls into a magnificent sunhat, protecting her from the sun.  It wraps itself around her in a protective embrace.  However, it also wraps around the man--inviting him into its intimate and vulnerable circle.  His own hair coils and transforms into monitoring eyes.  These represent the way hair senses the world around us--the follicles feeling every movement we can't see with our eyes.