“Character Heads”
Nora White
I can’t draw.
There are a lot of things that I can do. I can knit a sweater. I can fix a bicycle. But I just can’t draw.
I took a drawing class in high school and I still have nightmares that I’m back in that classroom. The teacher was kind to me, but it was a kindness drenched in pity. For one assignment we had to draw someone from a photograph. I had originally thought about bringing in a picture of my mother, but drawing hair was way too difficult for me. Instead, I brought in a picture of my balding father in. Every class period for two weeks, I looked back and forth between the photograph and the image growing on my page and wondered how my father had become this warped alien image: huge eyes, wide forehead, thin, tight lips. Every class period for two weeks I had to look at this bizarre version of my own father with his bulging skull and flat cheeks, and every class period it was somehow worse. Next to me, my best friend Abby reproduced a photo of her sister with a broad smile and cascading curls that somehow caught the light. Thank goodness that class was graded on participation.
When I first found out that I had to keep a journal on my trip to Austria, I wasn’t worried. Writing down things that happen and waxing poetic are two more things that I can do. We were spending two weeks studying Vienna at the turn of the century: art, music, Freud, and all that. My professor wanted to make sure that we were engaging with the sites we visited. Oh boy, can I engage. Then she told us a specific brand of journal to buy. From the art store. And suggested different pencils and erasers. Then she broke the worst news: she expected us to draw something every day.
She then waxed poetic about the drawing course that she had taken. How you start to look at the world differently when you draw. I thought about my dad’s twisted face. That was different.
Our first day in Vienna, mluggage was lost, and our hotel room was cold, and I desperately wanted to take a shower, but the shower stall was just in a corner of the room, with glass doors somehow more transparent than normal glass doors, and my two roommates were sleeping. I wrote for a little while about the flights and my missing suitcase. I left a blank space at the bottom of the page. I could find something to draw tomorrow. I rolled over and went to sleep.
Our second day in Vienna our professor took the six of us on a tour of the Ringstraße, the round street that circled the oldest part of Vienna, where the fortifying walls once were. The most important, stately buildings were on the Ringstraße, the Parliament, the theater, the opera, the university, the library, museum after museum standing firm in their neo-classical stateliness. We moved quickly in an attempt to stay warm, but snow flurries followed us around the ring. That night, I left a slightly larger blank space at the bottom of my journal entry.
Our third day in Vienna it wasn’t until after breakfast that we realized it was a Sunday, which meant almost everything in the city was closed. We took a bus to Steinhof to visit a church designed by the architect Otto Wagner and found that even that was on restricted hours. It was quite striking from the outside, but it was too cold to stay outside for long. We piled onto the next bus back to the city center. I left a full page. Maybe I could fill in some drawings on the plane ride home.
Our fourth day in Vienna, we went to the Belvedere Museum. After wandering through hallways filled with French Impressionists and Dutch Masters, standing for a little while in front of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, I found myself in a room off to the side filled with busts by Franz Xavier Messerschmitt. He was an eighteenth century sculptor who, according the wall card, had the honor of producing a likeness of Empress Maria Theresa, before undergoing “a personal crisis.” These sculptures were from after that crisis. They were called The Character Heads. Unlike the studied nonchalance that I had seen on sculptures down the hall, these faces were contorted by different emotions. The faces matched the titles on the wall perfectly: The Artist as He Imagined Himself Laughing, The Yawner, Childish Weeping, Haggard Old Man With Aching Eyes, Just Rescued From Drowning.
They seemed so out of place in this museum, and yet they had a room of their own. I reached for my camera and remembered that photography was not allowed. Or rather, a loud cough from a security guard reminded me that photography was not allowed. Then I remembered the journal and pencils that had migrated to the bottom of my purse. These faces seemed like something I could actually reproduce. In any case, they were already so absurd no one could accuse me of exaggerating.
I started with A Hypocrite and A Slanderer. His head leaned forward, producing a pile of deep chins on his squat neck. I filled in those lines first, then the deep wrinkles of his furrowed brow, then the scroll-like curls on either side of his frown. At first I was hesitant marking the vast expanse of white paper, but as the page filled with graphite wrinkles my strokes grew bolder. I looked at my work and laughed.
I put my journal away and continued through the gallery. I found myself in a room of secessionist artists. These painters, from around the turn of the century, left the world of academic art and began creating in their own collectives.
I stood in front of a painting that Oskar Kokoshka made of his mother. She sat calmly for her portrait, which her son rendered in thick, shaky brushstrokes. Her form blurred into the background. Her eyes were sunken, her mouth dark. Everything about her looked dingy. How could Kokoshka turn his own mother into something grotesque and have it hung in the Belvedere. I thought of my father.
I reached into my purse again and pulled out my journal. I found a place to sit, touched my pencil to the paper and started to draw the people in the gallery. Their squints, I made squinty-er. Their deep contemplation, I pulled deeper. I added furrows to their brows. The slight cock of their head, I pushed further, until the page in front of me held a gallery full of distorted museumgoers.
I made a game of this for the rest of the trip, finding contemplative people in museums and cafés, and drawing them in exaggerated, cartoonish strokes. I tried to pick out emotions and push their faces into corresponding shapes. I raced through my journal, filling the blank spaces that I had left with unlucky Austrians, until I had to search for scrap paper to tape in. On the last evening of our trip I reluctantly handed my journal over to my professor, who wanted to make sure we had been keeping good notes.
As she handed the it back to me the next morning she said that she wished I had written more, but my drawings were “very Kokoschka.”
