III.

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Jamie immediately signed up for classes through her local community center and asked her mother to take her to the library to check out all the books she could find on drawing technique. From the classes and books, she learned about “the ABC’s of drawing,” as Mr. Phillips called it. This comprised learning how to draw the cube, sphere, cylinder, and cone. Once she could draw those shapes in any lighting and from any angle, she could unlock the secret to drawing. With this new visual language, an apple became a sphere; a banana, a kind of curved cylinder; and a stack of books, elongated blocks. Afterwards, she could construct “words” using the ABC’s. For example, a boot became a composite of the shapes she had learned: a sphere for the toe, a cylinder for the foot and ankle, and a block for the heel. Even something as complicated as drawing hands became an exercise in simply identifying where the palm’s block ended and where the cylindrical fingers began. Jamie began to see the geometric shapes in all objects. At the same time, she became fascinated with light: how direct light differed from reflected light, and how reflected light could be seen even in the shadows of objects.

​

It was on either her second or third visit with Mr. Phillips when he encouraged her to start drawing from memory. He told her that a good draftsman was able to take what she had learned and create objects on paper just by imagining it. He explained that this was how to test what she already knew. Jamie took up the challenge with gusto and began studying various objects so she could draw them from memory at any angle and with any light source. From this, she got a taste for the god-like ability of artists to seemingly create something from nothing. Her sheltered and confined life that included school, homework, clarinet lessons, Bible study, Girl Scouts, and the constant oversight of her mother suddenly offered an escape hatch she could jump through at a moment’s notice.

When Jamie seemed to have mastered all the usual objects one would assign a beginning art student, Mr. Phillips suggested she draw the human figure—the most difficult and complex of forms to learn and draw. At first, Jamie was only to draw from a simple wooden figure, which emphasized the general shape of the torso, arms, legs, hands, and feet. As with the previous objects, she learned to draw the figure from memory in different poses, angles, and light. She found beauty in all the various gestures she was able to compose. From that point on, the human anatomy took on a whole new meaning for her. She thought all its complexity and elegant order as a kind of symphony in motion.

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As her own body began to mature and change, she naturally became more self-conscious of its imperfections. But she was also immensely curious about it as an object to be studied. She started to draw self-portraits in front of a mirror, fascinated with the skeleton and its various surface points: the shape of the skull, eye orbits, and mandible. The scapulae, the floating ribs, and the superior iliac spine of the pelvis that stuck out when she drew in her breath. The ball of the head of the ulna at the wrist, the metacarpals and phalanxes of the hand. The patella and the tops of the tibia and fibula that made up the knee, and the offset angle of the ankle, where the tibia and fibula once again met at the bottom of the leg. Each of these landmarks was important to navigating the human form, she thought. At the same time, Jamie was starting to notice anatomical variations among different people and ages, such as the S-shaped curvature of the clavicles, or the way an infant’s skull was not in proportion to the rest of its body.

Next, she moved on to the muscles. She checked out art history books from the library so that she could secretly begin to study and draw from photographs of Greek sculpture that revealed both the male and female anatomy without her mother censoring anything. She taught herself the major muscle groups, including the large pectoralis muscles, the abdominal muscles, the teardrop-shaped obliques, and the finger-like serratus muscles of the front torso, as well as the arms’ deltoids, biceps, and triceps. For the back, she memorized the triangle-shaped trapezius, the wing-like latissimus dorsi, and the infraspinatus that formed the oval-shaped mass just below the spine of the scapula. Not to mention the butterfly-like design of the glutes, and the powerful quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves. Learning artistic anatomy was daunting, and she knew it was going to take her some time until she could remember all the bones and muscles and draw each from memory. She kept herself motivated by reminding herself what Mr. Phillips had told her: “First you draw what you see, then you draw what you know.”

Jamie was progressing quickly, and Mr. Phillips asked her mother if she could start checking in more often. Their meetings were brief, with Mr. Phillips only giving her a few tips based on her progress, but they helped Jamie immensely. He would point out little things that she couldn’t get from any of her regular drawing instruction. For example, how the masters seldom drew a concave line when tracing the outline of the body, and how darker lines would naturally make that part of a drawing thrust into the foreground and grab the viewer’s attention, while lighter lines would make it recede and go out of focus. He also showed her the slow and deliberate cross-hatching technique that Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo had employed using a sanguine pencil on paper he prepared with chalk, telling her to wet and soften the tip of the pencil when she wanted to apply the maximum amount of medium to the paper.

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During one particular meeting, Mr. Phillips was explaining to Jamie the standard spacing technique between facial features—for example, how the ears were generally placed in line between the tops of the eyes and bottom of the nose.

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At that moment, Jamie interrupted to ask him about his photographic memory and how he remembered faces so easily.

“Patterns,” he replied, revealing the secret to his young prodigy. “As a portrait artist, you eventually realize that nature uses a finite sequence of arrangements over and over again. You see this not only with people’s faces, but in all objects. It’s more obvious if you study clouds, for example, or the attributes of water or sand spread out over a large area.”

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Jamie looked puzzled, so Mr. Phillips gave an analogy. “For example, there are thousands of words in the dictionary, all of which are variations on the same twenty-six-letter alphabet. When I look at a face, I see not only the ‘word,’ but the ‘letters’ it’s composed of, and even common prefixes or suffixes—that is, common word sequences. So, for me, it’s only a matter of taking what I already know about letters, and then memorizing the word. The key is to know the letters, or common attributes, such as a certain nose, set of eyes, shape of a head, mouth, and so on. It’s like a giant visual dictionary that I carry with me. It’s all just patterns, Jamie. All of us are just different compositions of the same limited set of letters. There’s nothing new under the sun.”

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Jamie thought about what Mr. Phillips had said and found it hard to get her head wrapped around the idea that we were all just the same elementary pieces composed differently. She wondered if there was someone in the world, not related to her, who looked exactly like her.

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She then asked him, “So, how many noses, eyes, and mouths have you memorized?”

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“Hundreds, I suppose. It’s a sort of special talent I have. I didn’t realize I had it until just a few years ago. It was an epiphany I had, you know, from all these years of doing portraits. It just all came to fruition.”

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“Fruition?”

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“Yeah, it just suddenly became known to me how similar we all are, and that nature is not limitless in its design.” Mr. Phillips now felt they were getting a bit off topic. “But we don’t have to talk about that now. You’re doing well. For next month, practice drawing faces, and you’ll see what I mean about patterns. Start with face shapes, which consist really of just four types.” He drew a sketch of each one on a piece of paper. “Inverted triangle, circle, oval, and square. You see, just from studying the different face shapes, we can see there is a finite selection of patterns to work from.”

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The philosophical content of their conversation put Jamie in deep introspection for days afterwards. She was learning an important truth about how all things were connected, and yet, she was bothered by the fact that what we all had in common was often overlooked. She knew that what we she was discovering for the first time would never be understood by most people, including her own family.

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She shared the idea with her science teacher, Ms. Nakamura, who agreed with Mr. Phillips’s observation and proceeded to show Jamie that science has, more or less, come to the same conclusion. She explained that not only do we share the same facial and bodily traits among relatives and closed groups of people, but that the DNA makeup of human beings shows that we are 99.9 percent identical.

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Jamie would later read an article about a young Irish woman who was challenged by a TV show to find her “twin stranger” or look-alike—what’s referred to as a doppelgänger, or someone who shares strikingly similar physical characteristics. Browsing social networks and other media outlets, within two weeks, the Irish woman was able to find her match in Dublin. Soon after, she would find another match in Genoa, and then a third in London. All four women looked identical, but were totally unrelated. Doppelgängers, she would learn, share not only physical similarities, but genetic ones too—that is, their DNA, when compared, shows virtual “identical twins.”

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Having guessed the total number of humans to have ever lived on Earth to be about a hundred billion, Ms. Nakamura told Jamie that she believed the system was repeating itself. “There can only be so much genetic diversity to go around,” she told Jamie. “Shuffle a deck of cards enough times, and you’re bound to get the same hand dealt to you twice. This means that it’s likely that there have been hundreds of people who have lived on Earth who looked just like you or me.”

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Nothing new under the sun, Jamie thought.

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As for Mr. Phillips’s ability to remember a stranger’s face, Jamie learned that there are three kinds of people. The first kind has “face blindness,” or what’s called prosopagnosia. Such individuals struggle with remembering faces, and for example, might not be able to identify someone they know well—including themselves—in a photograph. On the other end of the spectrum are people like Mr. Phillips, who would be categorized as a “super recognizer,” meaning an individual who has the ability to remember particular faces and recognize them years later—even if it was just someone they’d passed while driving down the street. Last, there are the rest of us, who fit somewhere in the middle. When taking road trips to the coast for a weekend getaway, Mr. Phillips used to tell his wife that he saw people he knew—complete strangers that might’ve been documented in one of his sketchbooks years earlier.

 

The next time Jamie met with Mr. Phillips, she had an entire sketchbook full of portraits. Some of them were from photos and others were her attempt to draw her father, mother, or sister, who would sit for no longer than a few minutes. “Just take a picture!” her sister protested, to which Jamie replied sternly, “It’s not the same. I’m supposed to connect with my subject on some level.”

As with drawing objects, Mr. Phillips encouraged her to draw faces from imagination. “You’ll be surprised what comes out of you,” he said. “You’ll wonder where inside such characters emerge from.” He further explained, “The artist is a great illusionist. How is it that from just a few lines strategically placed on a flat surface, the artist can create objects, people, places, and entire worlds that elicit feelings, thoughts, and emotions in other human beings? It’s a wonder.”

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This really piqued Jamie’s interest, as she had also felt there was a certain magical quality about art. She too wanted to be an artist/magician. She wondered if all artists weren’t just playing God on a very minute level.

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She shared with Mr. Phillips what Ms. Nakamura had told her about there being only so much genetic diversity to go around, and that out of a hundred billion people who had walked the Earth since the beginning of our species, there must have been several—maybe even hundreds—who had looked just like her.

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Mr. Phillips never told Jamie, but he was impressed that a young student would have an interest in such things. Most students he taught were only interested in technique and creating fantasy worlds, and put no thought into why they were painting in the first place. To Mr. Phillips, drawing and painting fulfilled a certain spiritual need. Any fame or wealth gained or lost as a result of making his art was secondary. To him, art wasn’t adornment; art was ritual.

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“Each of us carries an ancestral thread that goes through us,” he explained to Jamie. “If you have a keen eye and analyze every part of your body, you’ll see that you are like a quilt sewn together from parts of your parents. You might think, ‘Oh, my hands are my mother’s,’ or ‘My eyes I got from my father.’ Of course, there might also be some parts thrown in there that skipped a generation or two, and even one or two that are unique to you. But mostly it’s just a combination and recombination of your mom and dad. So, here we are, each of us this walking ancestral quilt.” He paused a few moments, before asking rhetorically, “But if it’s mostly mom and dad parts, where is ‘me’? Isn’t what we think of as ‘me’ mostly just a different arrangement of what was before?” And then, he concluded, “But such is the universe, Jamie—recycled parts.”

 

Jamie wondered why they had never mentioned this at Bible study. How could they have missed such an important insight? She wondered how far this ancestral thread went, and at what point did all the disparate threads join to make one? And if her body was a quilt, what about her mind? Was it also mom and dad parts? Was she even to blame for all her mental and physical imperfections? Was any of it her fault? And where was “me,” anyway?

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She had so many questions. Drawing and art had taken her in directions she could never have predicted. Whereas before, she had been somewhat secretive and protective about what she learned, she was now more open about it and wished to share it with the adults she was close to—like Ms. Nakamura, who, she believed, had the same sense of wonderment and fascination.

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In fact, it was Ms. Nakamura who introduced Jamie to the work of Charles Darwin and his “tree of life.” This referred to tracing life’s genetic source from the outer smaller branches, all the way down to a single trunk, where all species were said to be “joined.” She taught Jamie that all of life was bound by a holistic web of connections, and that patterns were to be found everywhere in the physical, biological, and ecological order of the universe. Similar to Mr. Phillips, Ms. Nakamura was thrilled to have such an inquisitive student and made an effort to provide her with more information.

Her mother, on the other hand, was not impressed.

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Continue to Part IV

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