A face is a template with set features, capable of being rearranged into an approaching-infinite number of expressions for the purpose of communication. Long before humans wrote, spoke, or drew, we made faces. Before your baby understands you, you make smiles at it. The baby understands the smile. Before the baby can ask for needs or express satiety, it scrunches its whole face in varying intensities of distress or contentment. The language of the face is fundamental, expressing the soul directly to souls, comprehensible without sound or speech.
Portraiture and masks have long fascinated me. They are abstractions of the face which, to create, require (1) a working physical knowledge of the facial features, their geometry, and how they can be rearranged; (2) a sense of what those features’ arrangements mean in whole, and how the parts contribute to the creation of that whole; (3) the need to express an emotional point through a constructed face because no other method of communication was adequate, to blast that feeling into another’s core. Artists can get such a sense of face that they construct a whole identity to accent a particular expression, granting a character history and life to emphasize a single fantastic moment of implied meaning. In this way, a face can act as a symbol alone, as a word creates meaning independent of the sentence it’s placed in. These faces, however, are often used
to construct a narrative through their placement in context with other faces and events. Thus the individual words become part of a structure similar to a sentence. Example:
Note, in the picture, the two types of faces and their placement in the painting. Christ, calm and accepting, is a demonstrator, and dominates the left side of the work. Note his smooth forehead, calm eyes aimed down at his own hand as it guides the hand of Thomas, his completely unconcerned face. The three incredulous men to whom he is demonstrating his wound crowd the right side of the work. Note their furrowed brows, eyes all pointed at Christ’s wound and the finger going into it, mouths agape when visible, their whole faces scrunched around their eyes which all draw direct lines to the wound. The message is clear. The finger points to the wound, the wound being the subject of the “sentence”, or the artistic message. Christ’s demonstration is the verb. The reaction of the men form either as adjective or as a dependent clause, qualifying the whole piece.
Christ demonstrates his wound, astonishing Thomas and company. Christ is subject, wound is object, the demonstration gesture is the verb, and Thomas’s/friends’ reaction is a dependent clause qualifying the main clause. Exciting, no?
My second example happens to be one of my favorite paintings. It’s simple and perfectly expressive of the principle.
Object — painting. Subject — “woman”. Action — viewing, expressed through direction of gaze. The whole quality of the work, though, the point of the sentence altogether is her reaction, the adjective or qualifying dependent clause is her disgust. As a whole: “Woman views abstract portrait of herself, experiencing disgust.” The simple action is not enough. The purpose of the statement is the qualification. And qualification oozes from her face. Jutted jaw, mouth agape, lips drawn downward into an active frown or exhalation, eyebrows drawn down into an angry furrow. Her face expresses everything without even going into the woman’s hunched, hastily-covered body, hands clasping a sheet to her breasts protecting her from a sudden state of shame and indignation.
Two examples communicate the point sufficiently. Constructed images, as discrete statements, serve as grammatical structures or sentences within which basic symbols communicate points. Faces are complex symbols which might serve to create the meaning of a phrase using a language fundamental to the human psyche, a language more direct than words by virtue of the raw empathic power only a face imparts. The effective use of a face has been demonstrated as equivalent to the creation of a word or clause.
I hypothesize that this “raw empathic power” is at least partly a function of basic human wiring. There is a system of “mirror neurons” in the brain which fires in patterns mimicking observed actions without forcing the observer to carry them out. To a limited extent, a neurotypical human will experience actions and even feelings as they are observed in others. This phenomenon has been observed in people as they observe bodies moving, others interacting or emoting, and, more relevantly, faces in their various contortions, though in the limited number of studies I browsed, portraits of some emotions evoked more empathy than others. [1][2]
Clarifying the points: the abstracted, conscious contortion of faces creates a linguistic code uniquely expressed in the elements of a face, and primal, intimately and emotionally relatable to viewers. Faces are units of expression that create empathy. One sees the face and imagines the feeling of making that face.
So in visual artwork faces are words or phrases in an emotional alphabet. And as words grant access to varying depths of feeling by providing a way to label, share, use, and consider them without full personal experience, so do these faces allow viewers to plumb emotional depths of unique occasions and intense shades, which words might have been unnecessary or impossible in describing.
The artist who masters the language of the face is the person who masters the communication of the human soul.
- 10.02.2018
Citations:
1] Likowski, K. U., Mühlberger, A., Gerdes, A. B. M., Wieser, M. J., Pauli, P., & Weyers, P. (2012). Facial mimicry and the mirror neuron system: simultaneous acquisition of facial electromyography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 214. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00214
2 ] Schulte-Ruther, M., Markowitsch, H. J., Fink, G. R., & Martina, P. (2007). Mirror Neuron and Theory off Mind Mechanisms Involved in Face-to-Face Interactions: A functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Approach to Empathy. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19(8), 1354–1372. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17651008
