What becomes visible when we return with fresh eyes?

Good heavens, that hand is enormous! Rodin-esque in fact.

I had just stepped into the studio still cloaked in summer. I opened the shades. Gold light spilled in as I scanned the room, landing on the painting on the end wall. There it was, paused, since I’d left it two months before.

The summer interlude had made me see again. Yes, 

  still more underpainting to do

  anatomy to resolve

  an oversized hand I couldn’t see till I’d gotten distance.

But I love the hand. I’m reluctant to adjust it, thinking it fits well as it is. I’ve been to the Rodin museum in Paris and was enamored with his sculpting of large feet and hands. Powerful. Expressive. They commanded my attention. They became part of his visual language. Could this be mine?

I’ve been working on hands and feet in my drawings. In my sketchbook pages, scraps of paper in the studio, you’ll find them, sketches of hands, feet. I’m finding the expression in them. The curves, the worn parts. The structure underneath draws me in. What started as hurried uncertain marks to blur out my lack of understanding, now bold and knowing. 

There were years when I didn’t know there were so many kinds of brushes and drawing tools, when I hadn’t a clue about composing a piece nor had the mental tools for determining proportion. In one of my drawing classes the professor remarked on the proportions of my figures. “Did you know that we tend to draw people as we see ourselves?” I looked at my drawing, a female, full-figured and fleshy.

Staring at my painting now, there was that hand. Big. Strong. Placed just perfectly in the composition. I laughed out loud, thinking back on that professor’s theory. Does it pan out, then, that I think of my own hands as quite large? 

One of the markers of the summer was holding Linda’s hands, surprised that they’d become so soft after weathering season after season of gardening, dirt under her nails, callouses in her palms. She’d held a baby decades ago, then lost him to cancer. Gradually, I watched her attention to the life she loved begin to waver, to slip away. “I have hands like my aunt Nellie now,” she said matter of factly. I wondered if they felt foreign to her. If they felt useful still. I am seeing her for the first time. 

Can I let it go? 

Eyes back on the painting, the hand tugs at me. I listen. 

Decide to give it time. Let it breathe again.