It's not a coincidence I'm drawing mouths, Part 2

It started last April 25. I went back and checked. That’s when the first mouth appears in my sketchbook, isolated and abstracted from the face. On March 29, I’d had a Twitter conversation about masks. 

I draw what moves me, what fixates me, I was fixated on mouths then. I was just thinking about achievement, about drawing again and being precise and getting better and I was drawing what made me look at it and go, yes, that, and if I can capture it I will have a inch of it to myself, bring some of it inside, and make it mine. 

Deserve it, maybe. 

I never question the urge, just critique the execution. So it wasn’t until THIS WEEK that a friend mentioned a CBC radio program about “face hunger” and then it hit me like lightning. We’ve all been wearing fucking masks hiding our mouths for a year. We started wearing masks in April. I drew that first mouth on the 25th. 

Well damn.

I’m mouth-hungry. 

Eyes don’t deserve their reputation as the most intimate facial feature. Mouths are what you actually touch, actually kiss, actually put theirs against yours. Eyes are so intimate as to be meaningless. Mouths are real, mouths are a little bit of your insides turned outward, a little bit of your plainness and wetness and want. 

I always got by just fine on sunny days when everyone wore sunglasses: I’ve learned this year that my social understanding is amputated when I can’t see mouths. 

I miss mouths. So I drew a collection of my own. My reflexive comfort-seeking, a fetish-cult, reminding myself that mouths in fact still exist.