Evocation of Experience (A Study in Human Faces)

Since September 2022 I have been busy drawing the faces of people I know or don’t know. Some I meet constantly and some I meet once by chance, in cafes, public places or with friends. I have filled nearly 100 sketchbooks (more than 7000 pages) with faces of real people.

What interests me in all of these faces and examples that I am currently studying is the evocation of experience. The ancient artist used puzzles or riddles as a starting point for aesthetic and emotional effects in works of art. It is a work with a religious and magical function as we know, but it is also a reflection of the emotional effect arising from a puzzle or image in Society, with simple, spontaneous, mysterious visual discoveries that are simple, yet poignant and stimulating to the artistic imagination, that the artist found before him, for example, scenes of faces in the human gatherings among which he lived, or animal faces, footprints, or mysterious buildings and sculptures, as happens when we see a face in rocks or overcast clouds.

It sparked the artist’s imagination and motivated him to create and complete his works, because many works of art begin with such first artistic stimuli and then grow and develop far beyond their first (simple) source, for example in our topic here (Humbaba’s face in the entrails of a sacrifice).

My goal in all of this is to research and question the depth of the common roots of aesthetics and the artistic and life experiences that bring me and an old Iraqi artist together.

That is why I am researching these ancient relics to show the extent of my influence by these common roots, and whether they still remain in the inherited subconscious, as psychologists claim, or are they modern accumulations of images and artistic forms that were stored in my consciousness and memory in the modern era, or perhaps both.

Satta Hashem 10/7/2024