I never considered much of my hands, any hands, until I started painting them.
Historically, the hand has been one of the most difficult body parts to reproduce in oil painting. French Impressionist, Edgar Degas, famously avoided painting them, leaving his dancing ballerinas with shadowed wrists and smudged fingers under a wash of burnt umber. The hand is complex, has a language of its own. Painting them only reveals their insistence: to paint a hand, one must use a hand. At once you are studying a hand from life, all the while looking at your own hand move the brush. You are considering your hand and the hand of the figure model, two separate identities merging on canvas.
We don’t speak much of hands. We might reach for a cup that inevitably spills, or accidentally wedge a thumb between door and hinge, frustration or pain as a reminder of their existence. Hands are somewhat of an afterthought, used constantly and with little conscious effort. They touch, reach, tear, cling. They sift, lift, squeeze, peel. Hands are seemingly uncomplicated.
Suppose I were to tell you, convince you, of the divine nature of the thumb, the ambiguity of extremities—suppose I twirled the ends of my hair into knots as we spoke. Can you see the mechanics of my knuckles? Do you notice the way a strand clings to a finger pad, sticky with lotion? Will you, I often wonder, notice the scar on my palm and the slump of my pinky?
I’ve been shy with my hands since childhood, when I realized my thumbs were nubs, short and fat, rather than slender, pointed, graceful. I catch myself still, sitting on the patio with friends, thumbs tucked into fists. I pick at my cuticles and bite my nails, which has forced them to grow in with ridges. Cupped in my lap is where they stay. Sleeves pulled down and around them, like they don’t exist.
It is unfeasible to go any given amount of time without seeing hands, whether or not they belong to you. The artist’s greatest struggle, then, may be the inability to truly look at the hand, its varying shapes, subtle edges, how light dances with shadow and collides into form. The immature artist tends to draw the hand in their mind, what they believe a hand looks like from experience, the idea of a hand. This is great mistake. Being ignorant of the hand’s vast bone structure may also be considered a great mistake. The gravest mistake of all, however, is avoiding negative space. Nothing can tell us more about the form of a hand than what is not shown.
In simple terms, observe what lay in front of you, and the emptiness surrounding it.
Something like light happens, like god, when hands are painted. No longer functional in quite the same way, yet accomplishing an intangible whisper of intimacy. Does a stroke of alizarin crimson belong in the cast shadow? How much space rests between each finger? Maybe you begin to wonder, in the negative space, where those hands have been, what they’ve touched, who they’ve held. Perhaps the painting has nothing to do with the hand at all. Perhaps it is more about what the hand is missing.
I fall in love with every hand I meet—it’s impossible not to. The big-eyed barista with slender fingers, gently sweeping coffee grounds into her palm. The tall boy in psych class with swollen knuckles. A woman sifting through a sleeve of Saltines, sucking the salt from her fingers.
Each time we are introduced to a stranger, we join hands. Every time something of substance, of beauty is witnessed, we slap them together in harmony. We high-five. We bump fists. We caress.
Have you forgotten, in the scramble of screens and restlessness of minds, to hold your hand to your chest and breathe? Have you forgotten, like so many, the sensation of cracking your knuckles, one after the other? Do you remember what it feels like to sift through dirt, to stroke the softness of an earlobe? Are you aware of your hands? Look down, memorize, touch with intention.
I think of specific hands, the ones I love most wrapped around me. I think of nuzzling knuckles when handing off a mug of coffee. The reassuring reach across a table after losing a game of cards. I think of a finger pressed to lips, shh, time to sleep.
Hands, of course, are functional. The paramedic sews and beats and sirens. The baker kneads and pours and folds. Hands are used differently and for separate acquisitions of skill. And yet, they make so much sense intertwined.
You might stroll through a museum just for the sake of admiring hands: clasped, limp, clinging. On a recent visit to a John Singer Sargent exhibit, I noticed each of his hands, painted with crisp cerulean, yellow ochre, cadmium red. I had forgotten how much ultramarine blue master oil painters use when painting hands, so much so that shadows often look purple, violet, or green, sap.
The blue to green to purple reminded me of a woman who moved in next door to my childhood home. She was in her early thirties, probably, but seemed much older in my squinted, sun beamed eyes. She used to water lilac weeds in her front lawn every evening. Her hands were sweet. Working to foster an environment that may have eventually devastated her grass, but, for now, everything was violet.
I watch hands move through rooms, greeting, grasping at lovers, unraveling loose thread. My hands crave to touch. Maybe cake batter, flour and egg yolk. The rugged, calloused palms of a lover. It could be, though, that my hands only truly crave to be understood, watched, considered. Perhaps if we paid more attention to hands, studied them with the mind of a painter, new life, a still and more intentional life, might be born.
The linoleum floor of my kitchen was replaced in the late 80’s, and even it’s ugly, crusted surface urges me to paint. I haven’t purchased new canvas since February, reusing the tattered and maimed masonite from college. Various hands are painted, layer after layer, covering up each sunken shadow and beam of light. My fingers smell of turpentine and mineral spirits though the brushes are never fully clean.
A neighbor down the hall noticed a copper red splat on my knuckle yesterday and asked, have you hurt yourself? I think you’re bleeding. I smiled at the thought. How lovely it would be for hands to bleed paint. Every scar and bruise, a small reminder of creation.
After years of avoiding their appearance and presence, my hands reach out, unclasped, free of long-sleeved disguise. What a wonder, what a delight, what an honor, I often think, it is to rummage through drawers or play rock, paper, scissors. How curious to yearn for a cheek to cup, a chin to lift. Hands are the most tangible source of tenderness, the nearest vessel for holding a paint brush. I’m still trying to understand what the hand is, in all of its persistence and struggle, but I feel I’m getting closer every time I wash the dishes.
Cassie Tatum is completing her MFA in Professional Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she seeks truth and meaning about the human experience through writing both fictional works and creative nonfiction essays.