Hands, Hygiene and Hope

Washing the hands is another powerful visual trope that has emerged during this pandemic. 

One set of associations that are especially potent for the English speaking world are those of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, who whilst sleepwalking in her chamber, tries to rub the stains of murder from her hands , crying out, 'what, will these hands ne'er be clean'. The 'Out damned spot' soliloquy now being used directly with images of hand washing, making a very timely point.

However for Lady Macbeth, ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. While soap can eliminate the virus, it cannot help mitigate the psychological aftermath of murder, some types of contamination can never be washed away.

Washing is an ancient trope and is often associated with religious ritual, as in, 'Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!'  (Psalm 51) This brings me to my second set of associations; hand washing is very like hand wringing and hand wringing is very closely associated with putting your hands together for prayer. 

From hand washing

via hand wringing

To praying

As John Wesley pointed out cleanliness is next to godliness, 

Prayer is often used to form a connection with invisible forces, to remove sin or to seek divine intercession. Hand washing is used to restore hygiene and to remove the traces of an invisible virus, whilst hand wringing is seen as a symptom of distress or it can be a feigned exhibition of distress. Many people with OCD are washing their hands over and over again, another symptom of distress; others are now praying to God to relieve them from the affects of a pandemic lockdown, there is a deep need to find comfort in times of distress and it emerges in different ways. You could argue that what prayer does is provide hope for those who have no other resources to turn to, a sort of last chance saloon; of course for the believers in religion it is a first, rather than last port of call. 

Durer

We have an almost subconscious collective mythic memory of the black death or plague that spread throughout Medieval Europe. It was spread by the bacterium yersinia pestis. Necrosis of the hands and feet being one of the common symptoms, the image below being the hand of someone who recently caught the plague from an infected rat.

Hand of a plague sufferer 

It is easy to see why the idea of a dark evil stain, could become associated with disease. However as a visual trope it has more recently become associated with Halloween make-up.

Hands made up for Halloween

There is though a very short step from the mock horror of zombie movies, into the visual reality of pandemic death. 

Ritual purification in Bali

In order to get rid of illness there are many bathing rituals. In Balinese culture, flower baths were used as healing rituals, designed to help both body and spirit. These have now being mainly turned into tourist attractions, but at one time they were an essential and integrated part of a whole body system of ritual cleansing. Ritual purification requires a follower of a religion to be free of uncleanliness, especially prior to worship. Ritual purification may also apply to objects and places, it is not just something reserved for people. Although not identical to physical dirtiness, ritual purification is often focused on removing body fluids and stains, all of which are generally considered to be ritually unclean.

Washing facilities outside the Blue Mosque Istanbul

When I was in Istanbul I was fascinated to see the importance placed on pre-prayer washing, something that is central to the preparing of oneself for an encounter with God in prayer. The whole body is made supplicant in Islamic prayer, which reminds us all of the reason for both kneeling and putting hands together in Christian prayer. Body and mind are supposed to be united in belief. 

Whether or not you are religious, there is a very important truth underlying these issues and that is that the mind and body are one unified thing and that physical actions are both a product of the mind and mind builders. Lady Macbeth's difficulty in washing her hands clean is clearly a deeply mental issue, not a physical one and our daily hand washing rituals in defence against an invisible virus, will also be building unconscious mental constructions as well as ensuring clean hands. 

See also: 

Drawing the corona virus

Drawing and thinking: How to understand the virus

The virus is looking at you

More thoughts on the embodied mind

Drawing hands

Connecting the singularity 

Drawing hands

One of the first drawings of yourself you will probably do is of your own hand. I suspect this is true of most artists, your 'other hand' is always available as a model and all drawers are acutely aware of the importance of the eye hand relationship. That relationship is a deep one and in many ways artist's drawings of hands exemplifies their world view. The hand becomes a microcosm through which the world itself is touched by meaning. There is a drawing by Seurat of the hand of Poussin, after Ingres. It is Poussin's right hand holding the edge of what looks like a small drawing board. In the Ingres' painting that Poussin did the drawing from, Poussin is directing us to look at the main event, 'The Apotheosis of Homer', but in Seurat's eyes the main event is Poussin's hand. This was the hand that made those tightly composed compositions that gave classical weight to the French tradition of painting. You get the feeling from Seurat's closely observed drawing that it was this strong drawing hand, the hand that felt for the clarity of expression that could be achieved by disegno, that was the real mind behind Poussin's work. Seurat would in his own time develop a series of drawings and paintings that would become a new classicism for a post impressionist world, this hand perhaps being for him a loadstone that indicated what was to become his life's ambition. 

Georges Seurat, The Hand of Poussin, after Ingres

Ingres: 'The Apotheosis of Homer'

Ingres: 'The Apotheosis of Homer' detail, portrait of Poussin

Ingres has a similar problem to Caravaggio when it comes to hands, Poussin's  left hand is too close to us in terms of size constancy, compare the image above with 'The Supper at Emmaus', below. The figure on the right with his hands stretched out wide would have an enormous right hand if he brought both hands together to prey. I think this is to do with the psychology of hands, they are so important to us that it is hard to be an impartial judge when making images of them, their importance to us is then reflected in the sizes we make them. The hand in essence becoming an additional portrait, that has a life of its own and that establishes its own space and presence within the overall image.

Caravaggio

Seurat's drawings are often presented as painter's drawings and Rodin's as sculptor's drawings. I think you could if you wanted to reverse this and think of Seurat as a sculptor and Rodin as a painter. Seurat was looking for a new way of giving classical weight to his images, his drawings simplify form and in doing this give a certain weight and monumentality to the world. 

Seurat

The two drawings above by Seurat are details, both images are seen with an eye for solid form and could easily have been done by a sculptor. If we look at Rodin's drawing of a hand in comparison it is more about energy and movement. Both the pencil and wash elements of the drawing reinforce this, the wash pulsing with liquid energy, whilst the linear pencil drawing establishes direction and position. Both artists were seeking to link their work back through a classical tradition, but both had to find a fresh approach to old problems. The energy in the mass as understood by late Michelangelo had to be rethought by Rodin, just as Raphael's constructed solidity had to be re-invented by Seurat. 

Rodin

Rodin

Rodin's drawing of a hand is a summation of a gesture, and when he comes to draw the body as a whole he again sums up the body as a vehicle for the containment of energy, something that would be vital to his sculptural work.
In contrast Henry Moore is about a more geological solidity, his hand drawings are closer in conception to Seurat's drawings. However Moore feels his way over the forms, cross contour lines travel over the wrist following the touch of the fingers of the right hand.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore studied at the Leeds College of Art as did Barbara Hepworth, but their drawings are very different. If you look at Hepworth's drawings of surgeons' hands below you can almost compare them to the drawings of Watteau. The delicate, sensitive touch needed by surgeons to operate with being almost wistful in its softness.

Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth

The more completed drawing above still has that delicate sensitive hand holding a scalpel, this time framed by the more sculptural presence of the surgeon and accompanying nurses. The drawing of hands below by Watteau is a similar study of small differences in gesture. However these hands are framed by their elaborate cuffs. Watteau's hands are more 'boney' than Hepworth's, or at least have more of a grasp of 'inner' structure, whilst still having a certain delicacy of touch; Watteau's chalk drawings using the subtle play of dark/light contrast to give weight to these small gestures.

Watteau

Watteau's hands suggest a life lived, one that has had to rely on subtle gestures to achieve communication with others, but even so a lived life is evident. This is a far cry from the hand drawings of Egon Schiele.

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele's drawings revel in the fact that the skeleton is always close to the surface of the hand. His skin covering is muscle-less, the pink watercolour masking out the bones that remind us of death, while at the same time revealing his own existential emptiness. In Watteau we are reminded of the fragility and yet strong delicacy of life, but in Schiele we are confronted with the end of life. If you then compare a hand drawn by Picasso made as a study for Guernica, there is a fascinating difference. Both hands in their different ways confront death, but Picasso's is a hand in revolt, a hand energised in its confrontation with pain, one that for all its distortion still possesses an inner strength, but Schiele's is too brittle to fight back, too thin to resist the coming end.

Picasso

Philip Guston

Of all the many hands I have looked at perhaps the most intriguing are the ones drawn and painted by Philip Guston. Guston sees the hand drawing as almost God like. It emerges from a celestial cloud, holds what looks like a stick of charcoal between two fingers, (a very ungainly way to hold any drawing tool) and veins stand out around the wrist suggesting a high venous pressure, possibly as a result of a poor life style. The low horizon line giganticises the hand, its rough form authentic as much as comic, awkward as much as kitsch. It is drawing a line in the sand, a line that could also be a shadow, a shadow that if it is a shadow has forgotten to cast the hand of its maker.  Nothing is right about this image and because of this it sticks. Sticky images are hard to come by and when they happen they stick. 

Qu Leilei

Addenda:

Since putting up this post I have been to see the Qu Leilei exhibition at the Khoan & Michael Sullivan Gallery of Chinese Paintings in the Ashmolian Museum in Oxford. His large ink drawings of hands are an alternative take on this tradition, a fusing together of Eastern and Western sensibilities, he uses his large drawings to comment on our use of hands as a powerful symbol for friendship and togetherness. 

 Käthe Kollwitz

Sometimes the hand has to be separated from the head. In this case Kollwitz suggests that the hand although linked to the head, (a head that stares hard at the line representing the drawing surface), is also separate from the head. The mind and the hand working together, separate and yet joined. The arm that connects them dissolved in energy marks. 

The language of hands

We must not forget that hands have a language to themselves and that we are constantly reinventing that language, automatically shaping and moving our hands as we communicate to others. They are like puppets, live creatures performing a constant dance and without them our communications would be so much the poorer. 

See post on the Drawing Research Network conference. 

See also:
The finger and mobile phone screens
Drawing ears
Drawing feet
Hands, hygiene and hope

Using hands as memory aids