Advanced Life Drawing : Love Song

Upon being asked to make a “humanoid,” I thought of a plethora of ways to make a hybrid body: a cyborg, a mermaid, a centaur—the list goes on. While thinking about this, however, I realized that every time I incorporate the human form into my work, I am making a humanoid. After all, I am making an image that resembles a human, but I am not making a human. They have been converted into a flattened version of a human—their shape has been made two dimensional, their pigment a result of my palette, and they are not portrayed with all of their experiences because they have been frozen in a single moment. As Michel Foucault said, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Then, I had another realization: aren’t we essentially creating an image of someone every time we interact with them? After all, we are viewing them from a specific angle, we describe them with limited definitions that we pull from our lexicon, and we do not have a full comprehension of the totality of their experiences. One can certainly argue that we only see humanoids around us: "Ceci n'est pas une humano."

My piece is a visual representation of a love song. I chose to use images of a person that I am very intimate with and have shared many memories with. Using these memories (or at least photos from these memories), I have formed an image of a person that I will attempt to communicate to others so that they can appreciate the beauty of the person I love. Of course, this process in itself is reducing my subject: after all, she is someone beyond my experiences with her, and photographs are too two dimensional to properly express every aspect of the moment. While the piece is clean and sleek, it is also mysterious: it is difficult to see the clear-cut images of the person because they blend with the piece. Upon closer inspection, it is possible to make out details of a human body, but these details are torn away and incomplete. The limited noir palette makes it difficult to read the details of the images; the only aspect that really differentiates one image from the other is a change in textural portrayal. Some images are made purely with lines, some made with black organic shapes, some made with different techniques in pointillism. While these images I have gathered are very much separate from one another, they have begun to blend together, and have taken on one connected body as a piece of art. So, while this is certainly a representation of a body, it’s not a “human.” It is art inspired by a person—it contains pieces of their experience, but when it comes down to it, it’s never going to be as fully formed as they are. The product—the art, the song—is, in itself, a humanoid. It represents a person, it is polished and beautiful, but it is far too reduced to ever truly compare to its subject.