Logan Tondini

We underestimate the power of our hands, our opposable thumbs allowed us to take advantage of our intelligence and build civilizations. The mobility of our fingers made convenient tools and our grip held up the human identity but that’s not what’s underestimated. We undervalue the stories they tell, the moods they set, and the amount of expression they are responsible for. It dawned on me that hands are more than an extension of our body but an extension of our soul when I found myself connecting to portraits with hands more than just portraits of just the face.

Going into the first year of IB art I initially wanted to see how much I could manipulate the expression the human body displays by distorting parts of the body perspective and watching my use of color to further emphasize a certain emotion or feeling that was already present in the form the body took. I was greatly inspired by Justin Bua and so for the first year, I was very focused just this. It wasn’t until the summer break that I started second-guessing my focus, it felt too obvious. I started noticing something more discrete within the similarities of my pieces. I noticed that I subconsciously put hands in the forefront of most of my pieces.

In many of my pieces, I was using hands to propel the impression of a wonky perspective

or to fill a space to create a good composition. I wasn’t entirely conscious of the weight they actually held in my pieces. So, over the summer I started looking a lot closer at my hands and other hands trying to see what they said about the current space and time. I did research by looking at the inclusion of hands in culturally significant works of art, like Michelangelo's Creation Of Adam and the symbolism of the raised hand in protest. I noticed many things and put together a basic guide as to what a hand is saying by its form.

To put it simply I organized different parts of the hand and the position of each part into different categories. The more I did this the more I learned and the deeper I could have gone in the complexity of a hand’s expression. It seemed exponential. With each part came a different function which opened up more possibilities of course. For example, the front of a hand can be imposing but depending on how flexed the fingers you change the emotion that is being imposed.

I then applied this research to my own works, narrowing in on just hands for the second year of IB art. First, I created an imposing hand reaching through water. This was my first application of the research that I did. It was gratifying in the sense that my piece felt like there was no unintentional confusion behind its function and intention. I created this piece intending for it to feel overwhelming and unsure whether the hand in subject is harmful or in need of help and I think with narrowing down my topic to just the hand I was able to develop that feeling much better. Essentially less meant more.

The Next thing I wanted to explore was how just hands can depict a relationship. This led to more research and understanding of hands. It’s natural to high five when in good spirits and it’s pretty telling when you see people holding hands with interlocked fingers that they are close in whatever way. For the next piece, I made I wanted to incorporate that and made a very frank handshake. Everyone knows that the handshake is a formal gesture and one that holds intentions to build something. My intentions were to make the viewer miss something that seemed to be under looked. With covid-19 people are paranoid to be in the same room let alone touch each other. People are paranoid but humans long for touch so I thought to stay true to my string of work and represent this a seemingly meaningless handshake would really work. Without any distractions, the viewer thinks about how the hand feels when touching another.

The arrangement will be very linear in order to have a direct presentation of my focus. Starting off with my pieces that don’t center around the hand and transitioning to my pieces where hands are the main focus. This will hopefully have the effect on the viewer that even with less context given for each piece they still understand the intention thanks to the hands.