ANOTHER VOICE
The Underground provides the most marvellous subjects for art
MATTHEW PARRIS
Iwish I could draw. Only draw. I have no ambition to command the palette or master the secrets of composition, no ambition to understand art. I am interested in faces. Only faces. Bodies are much alike, divided into the obvious categories of male and female, young and old, spare and muscular, fat and thin. But faces! They enthral me.
I spend many hours every week in Lon- don travelling on the Underground. A Tube carriage is a studio for the observa- tion of faces. Outside there is nothing; inside, everything is cruelly lit. Without embarrassment, without requiring to con- verse, you sit confronted at a range of a few feet by half-a-dozen people you do not know, will not meet and may never see again. And I watch them. Usually people are reading, sometimes talking among themselves, and this is best because you cannot properly study a face when the per- son is looking at you. To be examined unsettles, spoils composure. I like to observe unobserved, to stare without offending. The unwitting reveals most.
How beautiful, how noble are the faces of people. Charles Moore, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, is said to have remarked that old families are more inter- esting, and the remark has always puzzled me. All families are equally old and all faces are very, very old. The face is as old as the species, carrying with it the charac- ter of the species.
In a way it is the faces of those in their prime which are the oldest, for to study the form of a young adult is to study the species. The child is incomplete, while on the faces of the elderly time and experience have left an imprint which is new, recent; like a foot- print in the mind. But the face of youth is ancient, as ancient as a blank sheet before age scribbles on it and spoils it. Spring is a much older time than autumn. In the face of youth we see the genetic blueprint, the dummy, endlessly reproduced and variously destined, but by its very structure forcing upon each new instance the old constraints and the old Possibilities.
See where the muscles go, see the jaw, immensely strong. Watch it working, invol- untarily, like a kind of fidget. Note the con- trol even of the nostrils which can be braced open to inhale. Study the lips, amaz- ing things, animated rubber: so fluid in their movement yet under such marvellous control, every twitch, by its particular form, betraying to other humans a nuance of mood.
Or watch people's eyes. This takes effort because to look someone in the eye, being the way we engage their attention, quickly distracts us from the task of looking at the eye. But detach yourself, forget the danger of personal contact, and watch the eyes themselves as organs. How fragile, how intricate, how delicate and strange! See the rapid, involuntary blink — that tiny, auto- matic screen-wash repeated every few sec- onds; see how its frequency varies between faces, and according to mood. See the colours of the iris — such a paintbox from the deepest browns, through a mon- grelly range of greeny-browns, khakis and hazels, to blues of every shade and intensity, each with the hint of buried genetic infor- mation and racial history.
Look carefully at the skin. The skin on the face can often tell you more, and faster, about its bearer's physical condition and present mood than any other quick diagno- sis. Especially I have observed this to be true of black faces: darker skin is enor- mously sensitive to internal signals. It is also, to me, the most beautiful. Brown faces seem to me to show — I cannot say why the natural colour for human beings to be; it is as though white skin, like albino skin, is missing something. If I were black, I would find white faces by their very appearance Man makes escape bid from the Dome somehow frightening, strange. A Nigerian woman once remarked that making love to a white man was like making love to a skinned animal.
But it is the shape, the form, of faces on the Underground which thrills me most. If I were a society photographer or portrait artist I would every day curse the fate that condemned me to labour at capturing faces distinguished only by the individual's purse. So many features dulled by age, indulgence and — most of all in the rich and powerful — circumspection. So many bored faces, so many blunted faces, so much heaviness. While here on the Underground, travelling to my studios or clients' drawing-rooms, I would be surrounded by the most marvel- lous subjects for my art.
See that young woman there! Look at her sculpted cheekbones, her lips, her eyelash- es; look at the light in her eyes; see her intelligence, her softness; see just the early traces of lines around her eyes. Catch the tenderness in the face of that mother look- ing at her child, and also the tiredness. See the resemblance to the child; even the glance is the same though the child can hardly be four.
How is it we know that blond youth is not English? Extraordinary, is it not? No single feature — hair, skin, eyes, nose — betrays him as more likely to be foreign, perhaps Slavic, but something in the eyes tells me he is not one of us. He opens his mouth and speaks to a companion, in a foreign lan- guage. How did we guess? From the face?
Look at that man. How old is he? 26? What race is he? Pale face but surely partly Arab? Or Jewish? See how noble is his pro- file, the high bridge to his nose, the thin, fine lips, the rich brown eyes and wide fore- head. And that man over there, under the car-insurance advert, he must be part South American Indian; the skullishness to the face, the little hook, high in the bridge to the nose, both suggest it.
Perhaps that person works behind a supermarket till or in an office; another, perhaps, is a waiter or kitchen porter. Posed in a drawing-room, maybe those faces would lose their immediacy and power; and anyway these people have no money to sit for a portrait. But opposite on the Underground they will sit for me.
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
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