Cory Weinreb

I’ve always been very interested in the unspoken bond created between two people while exchanging a handshake. The intensity captured when two individuals lock hands is what inspired me to examine hands under different levels of stress and action. By enlarging my subjects and desaturating their hands of all color, I was able to explore the beauty and expressive potential of the human hand.

My concentration began with a non-conventional portrait drawing; I cropped in closely to the face and removed all color. I took an even less conventional view in my next drawing by focusing solely on the neck and avoiding the face altogether. I then moved to a part of the figure not immediately noticed, the knee, until finally arriving at the subject I would stay with for the remainder of the year: hands. By using charcoal as my medium, I was able to separate out the emotion that color inherently adds to the figure, and focus solely on the emotions inherent in my subject: hands. Charcoal also allowed me to create strong contrasts between my lights and darks which helped amplify the power of the hands in my compositions. At the end of the year I experimented with using red as my ground color in a piece, to see the power of a strong color against a desaturated figure, but then returned to black and white for my final pieces. In my last drawing, which explores the landscape of a human back, I realized that every part of the body has expressive potential.