Weird, but true: after years of anonymity, I've seen my face sketched for national consumption twice in the past two weeks.

The first such drawing appeared in The Readerville Journal, where Tim Bowers' caricatures of Paul Clark and me grace the top of page 20; Tim's pen-and-ink sketches are clean and iconic, distorted for comic effect. Then yesterday, Paul Dry Books sent me a .jpg of one of Grant Silverstein's illustrations for The Verb To Bird. Grant's illustrative style is very detailed and organic; in his etchings (which I've seen only online), every object is filled with fine lines and curves, as though you were getting a glimpse of the molecular chains making up the substance. There's exaggeration in some areas, but the distortion seems more expressionistic than comic. This drawing in particular looks almost like a work by Durer--a very odd thing to say about a picture of yourself.

And that's basically the weird thing: seeing my own face rendered by these artists, using these drastically different approaches, is completely unlike seeing my face in the the way I usually see it.

Obviously, most of us see our faces in two places: the mirror (by far the most common) and in photographs. I'm also used to seeing my features reduced to something simple and cartoonish, however, because I've done self-caricatures for decades. For the last ten years or so I've drawn a cartoon of myself and the family for our Christmas card. I don't know if it's great art, but it's certainly a chance for me to render on paper the features which give a viewer a shorthand version of my face: glasses, beard (most years, anyway), large jaw, small nose, dark wavy hair. When I saw Tim's drawing for the first time, my reaction was "I don't look like that!" What I soon realized, however, was that it looked like me, rather than like my self-caricature. Grant's illustration, too, uses the same source Tim did (the photo of me, taken by my friend Sarah R., that graces the bio page on this site) to produce a drawing that looks like my whole face, rather than like the big elements of it that I'm used to focusing on.

It makes me wonder what it must have been like to sit for a portrait in the old days, before photography, before mirrors were cheap, regular, and plentiful, when your only idea of your own appearance was what you could see in an uneven pane of glass or a still pool. When you have no idea of how you look, how do you carry yourself? Would a beautiful woman, ignorant of her own beauty, be more or less beautiful to those around her? And what did Lisa Giaconda think when she finally persuaded Leonardo to let her have a look at that plank he'd been painting on, when she finally saw the smoky outlines of her own face, the faint and immortal curve of her smile?
9:21 AM

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