Post AP Art: Hand Paintings

Currently hanging on the first floor of the Hess Center for Arts, the Post-AP Studio Art class is showcasing their most recent art project entitled, “Hand Paintings.” Spanning the course of several weeks, students engaged in a thoughtful process of learning how to transfer the intricacies of the human hand onto paper.

The “Hand Paintings” center around the illustration of the human hand and aim to represent a variety of themes, whether that be time, broken promises, or friendships. As the second major assignment in the Fall Term for the Post-AP class, this project allowed students to begin working from direct observation and later expand upon them with their own ideas. 

Visual and Performing Arts Teacher Mercedes Taylor, who assigned the project, said that her main goal was to teach the students the importance of process. “When you see a finished piece, you know, it’s hard to see all the work that has gone behind, from beginning to think of an idea and having a conceptual layer.”

Starting from lessons of simply observing one’s hands, Mrs. Taylor directed students to focus on the various shapes and contours that make up the human hand, challenging them to synthesize the way they see the composition of space. Later on, students expanded their range of inspiration as they started to engage with works from different artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Charles Wright, analyzing the way these artists use hands to express emotions. 

When starting the drawing phase, Mrs. Taylor urged the student to focus on the question: “What do you want your hands to express?” From this, they developed their sketches into pieces of art that aligned with their creative ideas. Students in the class experimented with ideas ranging from familial relationships to the portrayal of time. When talking about her piece, a student in the class, Allegra Sandell ’27, depicted her piece as a coming of age story. “There is a mother’s hand holding on to the hand of a baby in the bottom of the painting, and then an adolescent hand reaching for a stopwatch that is being held onto by an older hand.” 

Although these paintings focus primarily on the use of charcoal and pencil graphite, Mrs. Taylor hopes that within this drawing medium, students can still exercise their artistic freedom and wrestle with various compositional choices. “Once they go through the lessons of drawing hands, seeing the works of other artists, and then practicing, at some point it's like okay, you go. You are driving the ideas and the composition. You are deciding which materials to use,” said Mrs. Taylor. She further explained that “students are now independent and also feel they own their work.” 

Coming from AP, these students are well experienced with how to use graphite and charcoal, just not on this scale. Upon reflection, Sandell shared that the most technically challenging aspect of this project was capturing the nuanced details of the human hand, saying, “it was challenging to draw all the little details on a hand because there are so many small pieces. Specifically shading and making the wrinkles on the hand look as realistic as possible.” 

As this project comes to a close, Mrs. Taylor hopes that the students walk away with the lesson that they can finish anything they set their mind to. Upon starting this project, students were stepping into new territory. “They have some ideas, they have the tools, but they don’t know exactly from where they start and where exactly they are going to finish,” said Mrs. Taylor. However, students had to learn how to manage these uncertainties and how to stick with their ideas every step of the process. Upon completion, these hand paintings are yet another piece that students can add to their art portfolio. “Throughout the years, we build art portfolios so that they can go back to those portfolios and say, I did it once, I can do it again,” said Mrs. Taylor, who hopes students will carry this mentality in all future art projects.