Testa

Today I'm going to leave alone this drawing that I started, based on a sculpture by Christian Zucconi. I saw the image originally posted in Facebook by Hi-Fructose magazine.
I saw it and I fell in love.
I was/am very drawn to the facial expression, the mouth hanging open, like when you come out of the dentist and have been injected with anesthesia. His eyes seem to be swollen, he looks uncomfortable, he looks sideways. One of the sides of his mouth continues onto his cheek and jaw. And I also find his zygomatic bones to be incredibly beautiful.
I find the whole thing, beautiful, really, I would love to see it in person. His nose is also very strong looking, but it has this uneven crack going down the middle of it.
This series of Zucconi's work is meant to explore the fragility of the human body and its ability to heal over and over again. To convey that, he sculpts, then he destroys the sculpture and then he puts it back together, with the mended parts showing obviously. And the end result is hypnotizing.
Here is the sculpture that I'm referencing in my drawing and another one that I really like, that I would like to draw at some point, also.

And this is my drawing. I don't think my intention was to copy the sculpture, I don't remember with what intention I started drawing the sculpture, really, but I love how it's turned out. Sometimes, it seems like my drawing is kind of smiling, even though he doesn't mean to, because he is definitely not comfortable, either, whatever is happening to him. I worked with a Zebra ballpoint pen over Strathmore paper.

Albino Witch

I think I might have mentioned before that I'm a fan of overhead lighting, or maybe it was in a video. I think it was in a video that I talked about how I liked that kind of lighting.

I have, however, an issue when it comes to drawing overhead lighting, because I like smooth degradation of shadows, it's hard for me to just draw from my head. The parts which should be really strong and crude puddles of shadow, like the eye sockets, under the nose and under the zygomatic arches, I haven't been able to bring myself to mark them enough. The time that I think I've been most successful at it, is when I drew the Ice Cream Heads, I had specific reference pictures for those and even then, it was still difficult to do what I had to do.
I like overhead lighting, because it really marks the valleys and mountains of the face. More frontal lighting seems to just flatten out features and it really is the kind of lighting that is seen for advertising or illustration or really graphic shit.
Stronger lighting is used, apparently, when "dark" things want to be conveyed.
I love being able to see the eyes covered by the brow bone, the nasolabial fold marking a path from the nose to the sides of the lips, the diagonal from the zygomatic arches to the top lip, the nose hovering farthest out from the face. It's a thing of beauty. Features are feared and so are wrinkles and anything, I think, that really marks a human face.

So, this drawing, which I've titled "Albino Witch", is meant to be top lit. It's understood that it's some kind of subtle overhead lighting, like she is coming out of some shadows. Her eyebrows and hair are meant to be platinum, like somebody with albinism and, in my mind, her eyes are an almost white light blue. The way that Goldie Hawn's eyes looked in "Death Becomes Her" towards the end of the movie.
The witch looks beyond us, she seems fascinated by what she has her eyes on, her lips are slightly separated.

are correct.

Oral Fixation

The definition of Oral Fixation is hazy, in my personal opinion. Before I started looking for what it might mean, I sort of had a definition for it, or an idea of what it meant in my mind: it meant like there is some sort of focus around the oral cavity, an unintended gravitation towards it. Lately, I've been a bit more curious about why I center my attention around certain things, I think it might be because I'm in art school and I want to be able to talk about my work in a way that makes sense, I want to be able to articulate. Or maybe I just want to be able to verbalize things for myself. I've been wary of looking too much into things, because I feel like it's precisely that mystery that gives them soul. Maybe it was also an excuse to not look a bit harder.
Fucked if I know.

All on its own, though, I have been finding it easier to talk about my work, maybe it's from listening to so many other people talk about their work and being assigned readings about art.

So this oral fixation issue.
I think my favorite part of the face are the eyes, but when I draw faces, I find myself giving a lot of attention to the lips, as well. I like the lips looking like meat, which is what they are. Tissue that appears to be swollen and engorged with blood, fluffy, somehow rigid and soft at the same time, like a beach ball. Tissue that is not very resistant against sharp edges, but just tough enough to hold all the other tissue inside and so thin still that you can see through to all the red and muscle that is under it.
When I draw faces, I try as much as I can to leave the face for last, the eyes and the lips, but by the time that I've managed to work on most of the background, the eyes and lips are almost done, because I can't seem to help myself.
The line where the upper and lower lips meet, with upturned corners, it branches out into little cracks that are on the lips themselves, little wrinkles of expression, where the tissue folds. The lips slightly separated, they make a shy diversely shaped horizontal opening, right smack in the middle of them, suddenly, there is an orifice and a point of entry.
The lips so expressive and expressionless, depending on what you're looking at, and also completely puzzling. The parts of the lips, the two separate pillows in the bottom, separated by a generally decisive groove in the center. A discreet point in varying sizes at the top that then spreads out, like wings.

Through our lips, we ingest, we nurture our body, we taste our surroundings, communicate, we take in and we put out things from the world into our vessel and viceversa.

I'm almost sure I posted something relating to oral fixation earlier in the year or when I started school, but I can't seem to find the post. I haven't been diagnosed with Oral Fixation, nor do I entirely grasp what it is, even though I've looked it up more than once and read a little from different sources. The definition seems vague, at best.
This is the definition, according to dictionary.com: "noun a desire to have or put something in one's mouth, as in infants; a condition requiring stimulation of the mouth."
Here is a link to the Wikipedia article: Oral Stage

Now, the definition might be murky, because it was Freud trying to make sense of things from zero. He also thought that all our problems were rooted in masturbation and lived in an incredibly sexist era, which probably doesn't help very much, but as an idea to play with, I guess it's alright. Somewhere to start.
The human psyche is so complex, that I don't think one explanation would fit every case, either way.

My personal conclusion that I might have an oral fixation is simply because a lot of my anxieties and frustrations are manifested through my mouth: There's emotional and anxious eating, I play a lot with my mouth, I used to bite the insides of my mouth a lot, before that I bit my lower lip a ton. Now that I got a labret, I bite on that a lot, I used to play with my lower lip with my hands, just fiddling with it and now that I have the labret, I do that still.
I've resorted to chewing gum, instead of biting the insides of my mouth and whenever I feel "hungry", although I know I'm not and apparently I can chew gum endlessly. I do prefer that, than tearing at my insides with my teeth.
I also love chewing on crunchy shit, the deafening noise and having to press with my jaw, grounding down with my molars is an awesome thing.

So, I think an exploration of sorts of the probable fixation is that I've been wanting to draw mouths only and this one was finished recently. It's titled "Oral Self Portrait", and it is my mouth, with a crevice that allows my teeth to be seen and a labret piercing with horseshoe jewelry. I drew with a 3B pencil over Strathmore illustration board, I used an artist trading card, so it's 2.5 x 3.5" and with her owner, by now, I hope.