Portrait Commission in Metalpoint

This is a metalpoint portrait drawing. It’s size is 8×10 inches. It is made with 24 karat gold and aluminum. Metalpoint drawings are made by dragging a piece of metal across a surface prepared with an abrasive ground. It’s somewhat similar to drawing with pencils except that the drawing surface must be akin to a very fine sandpaper. This drawing is a commission, my client wanted me to draw his portrait.

Here you can see more of my metalpoint artworks. It is possible to create metalpoint art with various different metals, silverpoint being the most popular.

Here’s a photo of the semi-finished drawing. Erasing mistakes on a metalpoint ground is tricky. Unlike with pencils, you cannot easily fix a mistake. Regular erasers damage the drawing surface making it less abrasive. Gently rubbing the surface with a wet cotton swab is the best option in my experience, but the problem remains that in the metalpoint technique mistakes can be corrected only partially. This is why I started this drawing with the faces and hands. My probability of messing up is higher while working on more complicated areas of the drawing. If I need to scrap the drawing and start all over at some point, I’d rather it happen sooner instead of when the drawing is almost finished. This is why I prefer to draw the more complicated parts of the image first.

Here the finished drawing is photographed next to the tools I used for making it. From top to bottom: an aluminum wire brush (used for drawing hair), a 0.9 mm mechanical pencil with an aluminum wire inserted in it, a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil with an aluminum wire, a stylus with a 1 mm gold wire.

And this is how a metalpoint drawing looks like when it is viewed at an angle. It is shiny.

Like many other artists, I can draw human portraits. Unlike most other people, I am face blind. I didn’t realize this fact until I was already in my late teens. Growing up, I got used to recognizing people from various other characteristics—their voices, haircuts, height, age, gender, body types, skin color, even commonly worn outfits, never mind social occasions (for example, “this person in front of the classroom must be my Italian teacher and this person sitting next to me must be my classmate”). For a long time I didn’t notice that my own ability to recognize people was significantly worse than that of other people around me.

After realizing that there’s something odd going on with my brain, I spent a while hiding the fact that I cannot recognize people’s faces. That resulted in some miserable social interactions. Some person would approach me and start a conversation as if they knew me, and I would have no clue who they are. For example, once at my university I was approached by another student who started talking with me. After that I spent the next 20 minutes having a conversation with her while desperately trying to figure out who she was. Ultimately she made a random remark that allowed me to finally figure out that the two of us had attended German lessons together two years earlier. By now I have given up pretending—asking somebody who they are might be awkward, but it’s still better than having no clue with whom I’m talking.

As you can see, I’m capable of drawing a portrait of some specific person despite being face blind. When I see two human faces right in front of my eyes, I’m capable of telling the differences between them. I can see that one has a wider nose or narrower chin, I can see that the shape of their eyes differ, etc. That’s sufficient for drawing a human portrait. I just keep my model’s photo in front of my eyes, and my job is to draw the artwork to look exactly the same. I can do that.

What I cannot do is memorizing a unique human face. Unless some face is very unusual (and majority of human faces are average and very similar to each other), then I’m incapable of remembering how exactly they look like. I can recognize the face of Rowan Atkinson because of the birthmark on his cheek (same goes also for Marilyn Monroe). I can recognize Michael Jackson, because his nose and chin are unusually shaped. I could recognize some person with a scar on their face. But I just cannot recognize somebody who looks average.

Most people find it much easier to remember a unique human face than a unique chimpanzee face or the exact look of some tree or a building façade. For me it’s different—my visual memory is equally good regardless of what I’m trying to memorize or recognize. My guess is that my overall visual memory is probably average. Compared to other people, I don’t struggle memorizing the appearance of things around me.

My guess is that probably my own problem is prosopamnesia rather than prosopagnosia. The Wikipedia entry for prosopamnesia states that so far only two people have been diagnosed with it. Well, nobody has ever tested me. Of course, I cannot know what exactly is going on with me or how my brain works, since no professional specializing in face blindness has ever examined me (unfortunately there are no scientists specializing in face blindness living in my country, or else I’d love to volunteer for some research, I’m really curious about what exactly is going on with me).

Face blindness can be either genetically inherited or acquired as a result of incidental brain damage. I have always been like this, and my mother also struggles with recognizing people’s faces, so I’m assuming that for me it is genetic.

I know an artist who is colorblind. Nonetheless, he creates colorful artworks. For him colors are numbers on the computer screen. He knows which number corresponds to which color, he also learned color theory perfectly, much better than the average artist out there. Just like an airplane pilot can fly in the darkness while relying only on computer data, he also can create perfectly normal and colorful artworks by relying on his theoretical knowledge about colors without actually being able to see the colors he is using. This artist works for a graphic design company, and he hides from his employers the fact that he cannot see colors, because he fears that his employers might fire him if they found out about his colorblindness.

Since I’m self-employed, I think it’s safe for me to disclose my inability to remember human faces. I’m being optimistic and hoping that potential clients wouldn’t care about how exactly I create a portrait artwork. After all, as long as I can create some image, it shouldn’t matter how exactly I make it.

The main reason why I’m writing about this right now is because I find it interesting and inspiring how people can learn to overcome various quirks in how their brain and body functions. Who knows, maybe somebody reading this will find it inspiring that I can work as a portrait artist despite being face blind. Often enough, when there are some limitations on what our bodies or brains can do, it’s also possible to figure out some workaround how to overcome said limitation.