Out of hand

An essay on the enduring difficulty of trying to draw hands

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

Sometimes when I get it right, the result is immensely satisfying

I have been occupied for the last two hours on a cold Sunday night, with a tin of rose on the side, by an illustration of a hand holding a glass of wine. The illustration is for our new literary magazine chlorophyll (co-founded by myself and Annie Wallentine). The knuckles are out of proportion, the bent fingers seem like fat sausages, and the wrist is far too wide. It is much too specific to be comical but far too exaggerated to be real. So I keep rubbing the illustration out and repeating, again and again and again. Three hours later, the sketch seems vaguely like a hand, but I am impatient so I decide to draw a different picture of a hand holding a glass of wine. This sketch comes together in 10 minutes.

If I haven’t mentioned it already, drawing hands have always posed a challenge; naturally I am fascinated by them. The way they seem to wrap around a wine glass, elegant and pointed; the way I had them in front of myself, almost intertwined and tenderly cupping each other for my wedding photos; the way they artfully and carefully grip my coffee mug; how they hold my pen, poised forward… The insightful Jane Hirshfield wrote about hands so beautifully:

“A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.
Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.”

I try to remember the poem whenever I draw hands and fingers – whether it is to capture the shape of a random woman’s hands holding a book or smoking a cigarette or a man on the street eating a kebab wrapped inside a huge flatbread. Anyway, I give up easily so instead I draw approximate lines reaching out towards my object of choice. Sometimes I don’t draw hands or fingers. No, for a long time I just drew arms folding out in front that would cross at the hands and then a rectangular border to seal it within, leaving everything else to imagination. To the eyes to fill in the gaps. how very Impressionist of me, I think. I remember showing my work to my parents and my father (an artist himself) would ask: “Hands cut off by whom? What have they done to deserve this punishment?”

Last year, I drew a page of four women: mop of hair, two long plaits down the side, one facing sideways, and only one of them had hands and fingers, never mind that they resembled a fat seal – at least she had hands. I titled the set as ‘faces’. If I ever drew you, the nicest thing I could do was to add hands and fingers. I did this for my partner from a photo I took of him at my graduation; his right arm slumped across the table, fingers weighing down like succulent grapes and disappearing beneath the frame, while his left hand was cut off from the photo, a neat rectangular border forming around him. “What have they done to deserve this punishment?” I remember erasing my partner’s fingers over and over again to the point where the graphite left marks on the page, persisting despite my desperate attempts to remove any and all evidence of tendons and knuckles, branches of bones and rivers of veins. It might have taken a whole evening to draw this, but not all hands require a time sacrifice.

There is a (special) self-portrait where I’m drinking an amber frothy beer from the most beautiful chalice glass (Orval for those curious), which took me 10 minutes to sketch. No hands are present on the page, just fingers entering the frame from the left and glued onto the glass. I loved it so much that I put this illustration on my wedding invitation¹. (I think my nails cinched it.) But in another self-portrait a few days later, my fingers resembled long candles, nails lit like the swaying flames. In yet another self-portrait², I rest my chin on my right palm, fingers curled up like a row of snails, the curve of the fingers forming a cup to hold my face in – ever so dextrous whether I’m braiding my hair swiftly before bed, when I’m kneading dough, or when I’m happily holding a knife.

I was looking at art through history to study how fingers have been drawn and Cezanne’s ‘The Card Players’ series stands out. Some men’s fingers are more pronounced, their knuckles light and rosy, while others’ are a mere suggestion, a darker brown or black highlighting the shadows. I also love the studies he’d done before putting together the whole thing, and this guy with his arms crossed might be my favourite: there is the swell of the hand in ochre against all the swathe of blue around. John Singer Sargent’s portraits of other artists and his friends are a revelation in illustrating hands and fingers, specifically this portrait of Carolus-Duran³, where the sitter has his left hand contorted into what looks like such an awkward position for a hand to be in. This is Sargent’s way of showing his skill as a painter but I also think there is an intimacy to be depicted this way, to take so much care to express the possibilities at hand, with hands. After all, intimacy begins with the hand: we all hold hands with people we love and care about, our fingers intertwining without any worry. Prayer too asks for hands to come together. Of course, writing is equally intimate – where would we be without fingers and hands gripping pens, the tension mounting at the glance of a blank page, the nibs breaking the convention.

All of this – writing, cooking, art, baking, knitting – require hands and labour; you can never separate each from the other. I have previously written about the phenomenon of ‘hand taste’ or ‘hand fragrance’ that is always attributed to the woman, a matriarch, a wife, and where the labour is rendered invisible and forgotten. Many cooking reels on social media cut off everything else, except for the hands of the person performing – “the body is nowhere to be found”. “What have they done to deserve this punishment?”

Hands represent humanity. We make, create, and cook things with them. They are delicate but also vulgar⁴. The ridges of our palms apparently tell our future. I suppose mine says I have a long way to go before I get them right.

1. Which I drew, yes!

2. I was in my Frida Kahlo era

3. Who was also Sargent’s teacher

4. Especially if we’re looking at AI art that simply cannot get it right!