mannikin

Art, she says, is to rearrange. In trying to draw, one tries to imitate God. The dragon, a creature of human whim, is an odd conglomerate of snakes, bats, lizards, and other already existing things. It, as a whole, is a new object, complete with attached meanings and connotations. But we have only reached into the Artist’s paint box and borrowed in order to create something we can loosely call our own. Who created the dragon; is it possible to name an individual? Indeed, it is rather that a collective human imagination has created this thing called Dragon over time.
Can you think of a new color?
Day by day, on the artist’s desk, there is a wooden android that holds a pose according to command. And it waits to be clothed, to be given a face, given skin, bones, muscle; it waits, fettered, unable to move on its own will, completely still – the perfect model for observational drawing. The artist hardly thinks to thank the wooden statue for its help. These things with which she clothes the manikin are, after all, of her own conception. The android can hardly reach the full range of actual human movement. It is merely a stiff, awkward imitation. So, she thinks, she will compensate for the lack of smoothness of movement and of human-ness using her own experiences. Day after day, she commands the limbs of the wooden copy of a copy, superimposing onto the image of the copy of a copy the memory of her senses. She is too far away; in her desperation to imitate correctly, she accidentally ignores what is real – the charcoal hue, the fraying ends of a shoelace; the lintballs hanging on a sweater; the slight creases at the hems of a pair of pants; the imperfections; mankind. So, her art is never great, because she fails to borrow her tools from where they are most precise, and fails to borrow her eyes from Him who sees best.