Drawing Hands, 1948

A sheet of paper is pinned upon a background with four thumbtacks. A right hand, holding a pencil, sketches a shirt cuff on the paper. It is only a rough sketch, but a little farther to the right is a detailed drawing of a left hand emerges from the sleeve, and comes to life. This left hand is sketching the cuff from which the right hand emerges. It was with a great deal of interest that I read the article on "left-handedness in drawing". I was struck by the suggestion that left handed people might be more inclined to draw than to paint. In other words, shape might be more important to them than color. As far as I'm concerned, this is true. I was mostly left-handed from earliest childhood, and the fact that my feeling for shape is greater than that for color may also have resulted in my becoming a graphic artist rather than a painter. For a graphic artist who is always working with both an image and a mirror image, being ambidextrous is obviously an advantage.  M.C.E.